1630 Nature poems

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

As a fond mother, when the day is o'er, Leads by the hand her little child to bed, Half willing, half reluctant to be led, And leave his broken playthings on the floor, Still gazing at them through the open door, Nor wholly reassured and comforted By promises of others in their stead, Which, though more splendid, may not please him more; So Nature deals with us, and takes away Our playthings one by one, and by the hand Leads us to rest so gently, that we go Scarce knowing if we wish to go or stay, Being too full of sleep to understand How far the unknown transcends the what we know.

1981, &  for three days in Nebraska penny loafers are the talk, the thirties sensation all over again in one-light towns. Three days in Nebraska, &  a hundred calves come out bloody &   new as Wahoo &  Alma &  Dunning hum &  glow, turned liked searchlights into Colorado, where everyone’s already wearing their lucky shoes. It takes just one look at a boy from Ansley— there is love &  there is money &  there is everything in between, touched by both— one look at the packs approaching the drag in Imperial, as first &  second boy say hey & hey to third &  fourth— Three days in Nebraska, &  the bigger the sentiment, the harder it falls, &    all over the dreams of the pretty end somewhere in New York City, but just this one time, just these three days in Nebraska, the boys are clicking their boots &  singing I wish I was here in Nebraska

La luna Sang the miles por los palos de Nebraska You bunch of lights And houses    How did you walk to this place Buffalo Bill Better know him some Spanish Para Horses    ride rubber horseshoes moderno. El café Boiled water/no milk in sight. Homes that will travel interstate 8 o tomorrow in the morning for the next edge of town. The cowgirls/the local rodeo As they galloped by their hair unmoved by 15 miles per hour wind It seems that 25 pounds of hair spray is enough to hold a mountain down Their hair style longer than their faces. Que Pasa? Y los palos do not feel at home any more La luna goes round the star dotted cielo Let’s watch In this part of Mexico Se habla inglish.

It wasn’t until we got the Christmas tree into the house and up on the stand that our daughter discovered a small bird’s nest tucked among its needled branches. Amazing, that the nest had made it all the way from Nova Scotia on a truck mashed together with hundreds of other trees without being dislodged or crushed. And now it made the tree feel wilder, a balsam fir growing in our living room, as though at any moment a bird might flutter through the house and return to the nest. And yet, because we’d brought the tree indoors, we’d turned the nest into the first ornament. So we wound the tree with strings of lights, draped it with strands of red beads, and added the other ornaments, then dropped two small brass bells into the nest, like eggs containing music, and hung a painted goldfinch from the branch above, as if to keep them warm.

I walked out, and the nest was already there by the step.  Woven basket of a saint sent back to life as a bird who proceeded to make a mess of things.  Wind right through it, and any eggs long vanished.  But in my hand it was intricate pleasure, even the thorny reeds softened in the weave.  And the fading leaf mold, hardly itself anymore, merely a trick of light, if light can be tricked.  Deep in a life is another life.  I walked out, the nest already by the step.

The rooks are cawing  up and down the trees! Among their nests they caw. O sound I treasure, Ripe as old music is, the summer's measure, Sleep at her gossip, sylvan mysteries, With prate and clamour to give zest of these— In rune I trace the ancient law of pleasure, Of love, of all the busy-ness of leisure, With dream on dream of never-thwarted ease. O homely birds, whose cry is harbinger Of nothing sad, who know not anything Of sea-birds' loneliness, of Procne's strife, Rock round me when I die! So sweet it were To die by open doors, with you on wing Humming the deep security of life.

Poised on a bridge, streetlights on either shore, a man puts a saxophone to his lips, coins in an upturned cap, and a carousel in a piazza begins to turn: where are the gates to paradise? A woman leans over an outstretched paper cup — leather workers sew under lamps: a belt, wallet, purse — leather dyed maroon, beige, black — workers from Seoul, Lagos, Singapore — a fresco on a church wall depicts the death of a saint: a friar raises both hands in the air — on an airplane, a clot forms in a woman’s leg and starts to travel toward her heart — a string of notes riffles the water; and, as the clot lodges, at a market near lapping waves, men unload sardines in a burst of argentine light.

Into this net of leaves, green as old glass That the sun fondles, trembling like images In water, this live net, swung overhead From branch to branch, what swam? The spider’s thread Is less passive, where it appears to float Like a bright hair clinging to the wind’s coat. Hot at work, history neither schemes nor grieves Here where the soaking dead are last year’s leaves, And over them slung, meshed with sun, a net No creature wove, none frantically tried to fret. The huge weight of time without its sting Hangs in that greenly cradling woof. A wing Has caught there, held. Held. But not to stay, We know, who, how slowly, walk away.

1 When the loons cry, The night seems blacker, The water deeper. Across the shore: An eyelash-charcoal Fringe of pine trees. 2 The lake reflects Indefinite pewter, And intermittent thunder Lets us know The gods are arriving, One valley over. 3 After the long Melancholy of the fall, One longs for the crisp Brass shout of winter— The blaze of firewood, The window’s spill Of parlor lamplight Across the snow. 4 Flaring like a match Dropped in a dry patch, One sunset tells The spectrum’s story. See the last hunter’s Flashlight dim As he hurries home To his lighted window.