1630 Nature poems

Do not name your daughters Shaymaa, courage will march them into the bullet path of dictators. Do not name them Sundus, the garden of paradise calls out to its marigolds, gathers its green leaves up in its embrace. Do not name your children Malak or Raneem, angels want the companionship of others like them, their silvery wings trailing the filth of jail cells, the trill of their laughter a call to prayer. Do not name your sons Hamza. Do not taunt the torturer’s whip with promises of steadfastness. Do not name your sons Muhammad     Ahed     Zakaria     Ismail, they will become seashells, disappear in the sand. Do not name your children. Let them live nameless, seal their eyelids and sell their voices to the nightingale. Do not name your children and if you must call them by what withstands this endless season of decay. Name them mountains, call them stone.

Luxurious man, to bring his vice in use, Did after him the world seduce, And from the fields the flowers and plants allure, Where nature was most plain and pure. He first enclosed within the gardens square A dead and standing pool of air, And a more luscious earth for them did knead, Which stupified them while it fed. The pink grew then as double as his mind; The nutriment did change the kind. With strange perfumes he did the roses taint, And flowers themselves were taught to paint. The tulip, white, did for complexion seek, And learned to interline its cheek: Its onion root they then so high did hold, That one was for a meadow sold. Another world was searched, through oceans new, To find the Marvel of Peru.

My mind was once the true survey Of all these meadows fresh and gay, And in the greenness of the grass Did see its hopes as in a glass; When Juliana came, and she What I do to the grass, does to my thoughts and me. But these, while I with sorrow pine, Grew more luxuriant still and fine, That not one blade of grass you spy’d But had a flower on either side; When Juliana came, and she What I do to the grass, does to my thoughts and me. Unthankful meadows, could you so A fellowship so true forgo? And in your gaudy May-games meet While I lay trodden under feet? When Juliana came, and she What I do to the grass, does to my thoughts and me. But what you in compassion ought, Shall now by my revenge be wrought; And flow’rs, and grass, and I and all, Will in one common ruin fall. For Juliana comes, and she What I do to the grass, does to my thoughts and me. And thus, ye meadows, which have been Companions of my thoughts more green, Shall now the heraldry become With which I shall adorn my tomb; For Juliana comes, and she What I do to the grass, does to my thoughts and me.

The mower stalled, twice; kneeling, I found A hedgehog jammed up against the blades, Killed. It had been in the long grass. I had seen it before, and even fed it, once. Now I had mauled its unobtrusive world Unmendably. Burial was no help: Next morning I got up and it did not. The first day after a death, the new absence Is always the same; we should be careful Of each other, we should be kind While there is still time.

Sleepy and suburban at dusk, I learn again the yard’s geometry, edging around the garden and the weedy knots of flowers, circling trees and shrubs, giving a wide berth to the berry patch, heavy and sprawled out of its bounds. Shoving such a machine around a fairway of dandelions, it is easy to feel absurd. The average lawn, left alone one hundred years, could become a hardwood forest. An admirable project. Still I carry on, following week on week the same mowing pattern, cutting edges, almost sprinting the last narrow swaths. And tonight, as I mow over the bushels of fallen peaches, sending pits soaring over the neighbors’ fences, seems hardly any different. But on one crooked march I walk across the thin hidden hole to a yellowjacket hive. The blade pulls them up from their deep sweet chamber just as my bare legs go by. A bee lands heavily, all blunder and revenge, and the sting is a quick embrace and release, like the dared kid’s run and touch of a blind man. I’m blind now with the shock and pain of it, howling in a sprint toward the house, the mower flopped on its side, wild blade loose in the darkening air. Later, the motor sputtered quiet, starved by tilt, I’m back in the twilight, a half-dozen stings packed in wet tobacco, carrying a can of gasoline, a five-foot torch. The destruction is easy: shove can slow to entranceway lip, pull back and light torch, use torch to tip can. One low whump and it’s over. A few flaming drones flutter out and fall. Stragglers, late returners, cruise wide circles around the ruins. In the cool September night they fly or die. In the morning I finish my chores. All the way to winter the blackened hole remains. On Christmas Eve a light late snow covers it and all the lawn’s other imperfections: crabgrass hummocks, high maple roots, the mushroom-laden fairy ring that defies obliteration and appears every spring more visible than ever. Standing in the window, the scent of pine powerful around me, the snap of wood undoing itself in the stove, I wonder at this thin and cold camouflage, falling, gradually falling over what has gone and grown before. And I hear that other rattle and report, that engine driven by another fire. I think of a gold that is sweet and unguent, a gold that is a blaze of years behind me. I hear wind in its regular passes blowing across the roof, feel in my legs a minute and icy tingling, as though I have stood too long in one place or made again another wrong step, as though the present itself were a kind of memory, coiled, waiting, dying to be seen from tomorrow.

There was never a sound beside the wood but one, And that was my long scythe whispering to the ground. What was it it whispered? I knew not well myself; Perhaps it was something about the heat of the sun, Something, perhaps, about the lack of sound— And that was why it whispered and did not speak. It was no dream of the gift of idle hours, Or easy gold at the hand of fay or elf: Anything more than the truth would have seemed too weak To the earnest love that laid the swale in rows, Not without feeble-pointed spikes of flowers (Pale orchises), and scared a bright green snake. The fact is the sweetest dream that labor knows. My long scythe whispered and left the hay to make.

The minute the fiddler takes to the stage betwixt the rapper and the organist I dive out through a slit in the rear of the reggae tent, meaning to take a slash and chill. But there’s a rave throbbing in the woods beyond. Bonfires radiating inside holly, spruce, and ash. Canvas banners thrashing in the storm. Chinese lanterns chase across the speckled dusk like molten bloodhounds packed against the moon. I’m twisted, I’m a little bit skagged. Can’t recall who I tagged along to the festival with, what o’clock or eve it is, precisely    ... How the trout am I gonna get home?    ...    Did I bring a tent    ...    Yo! What the sugar’s the hun with the glow sticks, the yokes, the coloredy fleece called again?    ...    If you fly with the crows you’ll be shot with the crows    ...    my Dad said. Could be doing with a suck on a spliff    ...    a dab    ...    so scanning fore, then midground for someone to tap, I sketch three paralytics at a tipped-over shitehouse, legless, clasping wire fence to hold upright. Never piss on electric wire. In Tipperary Gah shirts. Tall guys. Hurlers. Sinewy bastards. Dude in the middle bending double belching steam and spittle like a hot bog in Iceland, chucking up loads. Distressed he is. Heavyweight retching bout. Losing control. Nearly throwing the towel in, collallapsing. I see him stretched out to dissolve in the land and its zillions of ants, trillions of carcasses. What a banquet he’d make for the jackdaws. If ya lie down with the dogs ya’ll rise up with the fleas. Small urge in me for calling an ambulance. Small but rapidly growing. ’Til the others start egging him on. G’wan Jamey! Fucking champion craic man! Jamey swims with the general will — hauls himself rigid and warrior-tall, drawing gallon-swills of boosting oxygen, then arches crablike at the waist to balance backwards on his massive palms, stalling as the constellations eddy, the cosmos rearranges around him, ’til his whistling tongue-tip comes aligned with the prong of The Plough and he launches like Polaris through the murk, propelling himself straight, hurling bilious floods of intermingled crackers, croutons, crisps, sausage rolls, Diarmuid’s Special Offer Salsa Dips, Guinness, Smirnoff Ice, Devil’s Bit, roasted nuts and Dubonnet and effervescent codeine foam and fizz up up up up over the fence up over the flags up over the maize down into the pines down into the flames down into the rave.

His muddy rubber boots stood in the farmhouse mud room while he sat in the kitchen, unshaven, dealing solitaire. His wife (we called her Auntie) rolled out dough in the kitchen for a pie, put up preserves and tidied, clearing her throat. They listened to the TV at six, he with his fingers fumbling the hearing aids, she watching the kitchen clock. Old age went on like that, a vegetable patch, a horse some neighbor kept in the barn, the miles of grass and fences. After he died his boots stood muddy in the mud room as if he'd gone in socks, softly out to the meadow.

We unstave the winter’s tangle. Sad tomatoes, sullen sky. We unplay the summer’s blight. Rotted on the vine, black fruit swings free of the strings that bound it. In the compost, ghost melon; in the fields(,) grotesque extruded peppers. We prod half-thawed mucky things. In the sky, starlings eddying. Tomorrow, snow again, old silence. Today, the creaking icy puller. Last night I woke to wild unfrozen prattle. Rain on the roof— a foreign liquid tongue.

You have towered here leaning half over the wall all my awareness years before I knew what silkworm was or China I felt your berries pulp under my feet tracked your purple all over grandmother’s carpet a sapling planted by some sea captain to make shade for a future This winter you lost one of  your long low branches to a backed-up car and the old woman who has known you all her life wept at the split wood Your bark is wrinkled more deeply than any face you live so slowly do our voices sound to you like the fluttering of  paper moth wings do we seem rootless holding fast to the anchor of  the saddest things