1630 Nature poems

It’s the mystery of the hunt that intrigues me, That drives us like lemmings, but cautiously— The search for a bright square cloud—the scent of lemon verbena— Or to learn rules for the game the sea otters Play in the surf. It is these small things—and the secret behind them That fill the heart. The pattern, the spirit, the fiery demon That link them together And pull their freedom into our senses, The smell of a shrub, a cloud, the action of animals —The rising, the exuberance, when the mystery is unveiled. It is these small things That when brought into vision become an inferno.

Yes, I’ll haul your ashes back to Oklahoma, the Lord G-d of Abraham riding shotgun. I got the coffee sweats already, just Him and me on I-55, you in a box on the seat between. We aim for that dent in the dust where your pa was born in a sod stable and your ma minced a snake with a garden hoe; that place the trappers named Beaver, not thinking, for once, of women. Reminded too much of Texas, G-d and I both hate the cottonwoods stuck to a high sky. We share a drink, swap our lies, and sift out what we can from the radio. Your name comes up and G-d’s eyes get dusty. When Gene Pitney sings the “Sh’ma Yisrael,” G-d stares out, that box of ashes inside His jacket, as close as He can hold it. There’s Beaver at nightfall, and bean burritos to wash down the beer. We scatter your ashes where we stop to pee, the Lord G-d’s laugh steady as a train blows, soft as lightning across the panhandle.

Why not a crocus from this bulb? Why not the purple of bees’ lust so that, in honey, she might taste something good? Under skin, purple is a private taste, closer to the blood of her tongue, closer to the blood she chokes on when she’s gasping, to the clot behind her blackened eye. The heated force that slammed her shin, that pushed bone from the bone, that arched her but did not approach caress, is another kind of lust. Spring: a madness of grappling. Isn’t that what she sees outside every window? And inside? Nothing unique going on.

The soaked books lip open in piles. The shelves stoop, slough paint. The doors, their locks sprung, hinge air open to weather, gulp rain. Something here enters the trees. If we believe in ghosts, white pearl shadows the batten and boards. Rust runs on the shelves. The sounds on air wail, a nail in the thumb. Stickers underfoot poke holes. In rafters, wings or the suggestion of wings rend air, whoosh of rubbish, burnt rubber hooks for skeleton elbows. Ash, dry sift through moist fingers in a room where everything's mold.

A narrow Fellow in the Grass Occasionally rides - You may have met him? Did you not His notice instant is - The Grass divides as with a Comb, A spotted Shaft is seen, And then it closes at your Feet And opens further on - He likes a Boggy Acre - A Floor too cool for Corn - But when a Boy and Barefoot I more than once at Noon Have passed I thought a Whip Lash Unbraiding in the Sun When stooping to secure it It wrinkled And was gone - Several of Nature’s People I know, and they know me I feel for them a transport Of Cordiality But never met this Fellow Attended or alone Without a tighter Breathing And Zero at the Bone.

We saw a lot more of them dead than alive the living diffident by the side of the road as the far-off mountains flanked and intoxicated the speedometer into saunter The dead were interspersed on the asphalt their poor vision uncorrected by their auditory keenness like a blind spot in a poet and their fender-mangled corpses were occasionally ripped in two before vultures reached them In our rental van we left no mother bereft and orphaned no piglets Turkey buzzards and American vultures were the javelinas’ gift to us red and black scavengers that perched on ranchland fences the full span of highway they’d circle above in diminishing downward spirals or flinch at each other’s puffs and swells or away from incoming vehicles Still they shared the dead among them as we sometimes share our dead when we love our dead Javelina the Arabic word for mountain in its root and then the mountain coming closer to an ear became a spear

Neither my father nor my mother knew the names of the trees where I was born what is that I asked and my father and mother did not hear they did not look where I pointed surfaces of furniture held the attention of their fingers and across the room they could watch walls they had forgotten where there were no questions no voices and no shade Were there trees where they were children where I had not been I asked were there trees in those places where my father and my mother were born and in that time did my father and my mother see them and when they said yes it meant they did not remember What were they I asked what were they but both my father and my mother said they never knew

1 Since the irrational “because I said so” start, they’d had their differences: color that isn’t really color, spin that isn’t spin because attitude’s best when it has no content. Ask a physicist what “charge” is; he’ll say your question makes no sense. 2 Word had it that if they surrendered their feckless ways and their lives with no end, if they joined up, they would get a head, something to speak for them: The head says, “I don’t want to die.” Says, “I am all alone here.”

1 Discomfort marks the boundary. One early symptom was the boundary. The invention of hunger. I could use energy. To serve. Elaborate systems in the service of far-fetched demands. The great termite mounds serve as air-conditioners. Temperature within must never vary more than 2 degrees. 2 Which came first the need or the system? Systematic. System player. Scheme of Things. The body considered as a functional unit. “My system craves calcium.” An organized set of doctrines. A network formed for the purpose of ... “All I want is you.” 3 was narrowing their options to one, the next development. Soldiers have elongate heads and massive mandibles. Squirtgun heads are found among fiercer species. Since soldiers cannot feed themselves, each requires a troupe of attendants. 4 Her demands had become more elaborate. He must be blindfolded, (Must break off his own wings) wear this corset laced tight (seal up the nuptial cell) to attain his heart’s desire. Move only as she permits (Mate the bloated queen each season) or be hung from the rafters. How did he get here? 5 Poor baby, I heard your hammer. The invention of pounding. “As soon as it became important that free energy be channeled.” Once you cared to be set off from the surrounding medium. This order has been preferred since improvement was discovered. The moment one intends to grow at the expense. When teeth emerge Demand for special treatment was an early symptom

I’m sitting at Nathan’s, reading a biography of Darwin who, right now, is dissecting a barnacle “no bigger than a pinhead (and with two penises)”: he’ll work like this on barnacles, his wrists supported by rigged-up blocks of workshop wood, for eight years. Nathan is reading too, in the worn-down banged-up “daddy chair”: those philosophical poems of William Bronk’s. What’s most delightful is that Tristan, eleven, and Aidan, ten, are reading, each of them enmazed in a fantasy novel that squeezes them by the attention-bone behind the eyes in its thimble pool of pineal juice and drizzled endorphins. Tristan cared enough to cry when he finished his previous book and its battle of shadow and radiance was over. Each of us: his individual book; and yet the silence is communal. This is a natural state at Nathan’s. Holly, however, is reading the Sunday paper and so serves, without saying a word, to remind us how natural it was for Raeshawn Nelson, seven, to fall while running and burn out his eye on the disregarded meth pipe, or for Anna Rietta, nine, to have come home from school and excitedly been the **!star!**, each day, of the homemade porn her parents peddled as “young fun” over the Internet. This was what they knew, and all they knew, and so they entered it as comfortably as Tristan does his opened world of sorcerors and valiant knights and fancy-talking beasts, since use x frequency = familiarity. That’s the strict, imperious math of everybody’s insular subuniverse. Sherena asked me what this thing “vermouth” was (she pronounced it “mouth”) and ordered quiche as if it were the brother of “touché”; but then she needed to explain to me why C-C was the “bottom bitch” and what a “T-girl” is and how to put down money on Ice’s book at “the county,” by which she meant jail. And those years when Darwin parsed the slimy fiber of his barnacles (discovering the species where “the female has no anus” and the one with “tiny parasitic males [that were] embedded in one female’s flesh like blackheads”), “squinty . . . laborious,” were among the final decades of hundreds of years when a woman in China would suffer ritual foot binding, at five, the bandages limiting growth until the toes were bent and curled (the toenails growing into the balls of the feet) and the arches broken. This resulted in the desirable “shrunken plums” and “three-inch golden lilies” sought by marriage brokers. Traditionally, a prospective mother-in-law would check below the hem, and reject any feet over four inches long. Entire generations of women could only mince and hobble. And this was natural, this was the air and the light and “the-way-of-things-forever” that you woke up to every day . . . as natural as the implicit laws in Aidan’s book, by which a bear converses with a girl in growly mutual-speak, and a boy of sturdy heart and his wingéd horse ascend their sky with the unremarkable grace of birds in ours. That’s ordinary Newtonian physics there, and Aidan subjects himself to the rules of flying horsemanship, and the code of those of innocent spirit about to war with wyverns and the wormfolk, and the governing instructions of gods with the heads of wide-eyed animals . . . and even now, Sherena texts my phone to say that WEATHER GOOD and SHINE GOT BULLET IN LUNG FROM POLICE