1630 Nature poems

The screamer sleeps, inside. The desert's wide awake: the mouse, the rattlesnake. I've come out here to hide, behind our house, below the riddled sky, afraid of what our bodies made. To the south: Mexico... These are the nights men run. Guaymas before midday, a beach-town life...I play it out. Such things are done. The Rincons seep like a stain into the paling east. The borders are policed. The wail, nearby, of a train.

Did a big brain       raise us into mountains to range over the valley, to see the approach     before whoever it was     knew they would walk a path between dusk & dawn half-awake? An eye squinted, & sex as idea made the lids dance. Now, the brain pauses     on the edge of ascension or surrender, one sleepy hand pointing at a totem, & the other weighing a stick or jagged stone.

Yes, your face like asphalt dust on my tongue whenever it rains. I’ll say it’s the last time I call, tomorrow. In your arms it won’t be the same, each step farther from the border. Gin and tonics. Tequila grapefruits. I threw that black mug at your face after gin, after tequila, I didn’t know Enrique’s Journey would trigger me, I’m sorry. I drank too much. I drink too much, yes, I know. It wasn’t me who threw it, I said, but it was. It’s me who needs to learn how to face grandpa’s bullet shells, bottles, broken chairs, doors he woke us up with. I was four. I saw Mom between his gun and Grandma. I was four. I need to forgive the coins he placed in my hands to buy him vodka. Grandpa chased every single one of his daughters with his machete in the middle of the day, in the middle of the night, I didn’t know what to do except climb the water tower across the street with Red Power Ranger. He’s chased us to this country that trained him to stay quiet when “his boss” put prisoners in black bags, then pushed them out the truck, “for everyone to see what happens to bad people here.” Gin, straight up. Tequila shots. I’ve picked up the shards in our apartment, wiped the black smudge next to our bed, promised never to do it again, that I’ll seek help, but I don’t. I make an excuse. No one understands why Abuelita never left him. It’s mid-June, Venus and Mars the closest they’ve been in 2,000 years, but I’ve never seen grandparents hug, or hold hands. I make an excuse. You kept rubbing your hands. When I turned six grandpa quit drinking. He stayed at home at night but never talked to us. He didn’t like gin. Didn’t like writers. Didn’t like leftists. Everyone gone except one aunt. You’re not here. Tomorrow, tampoco. These walls snore like grandpa’s slurred shouts. I thought the border would take him. All my aunts, my mom, thought so too. We’re all running from the sun on his machete. The moon on his gun.

Out of orange juice out of gin. Me & him? We like to walk around. Lumpy houses cars on blocks. Jesus Jesus rest your head.

east the whole moon burns behind jamestown seven wings of geese light the thin ice west the asian sun bloody on the interstate spring flowers break on the gray prairie exit fingerprints on the rearview mirror feral shadows transposed near fargo

What I adore is not horses, with their modern domestic life span of 25 years. What I adore is a bug that lives only one day, especially if it’s a terrible day, a day of train derailment or chemical lake or cop admits to cover-up, a day when no one thinks of anything else, least of all that bug. I know how it feels, born as I’ve been into these rotting times, as into sin. Everybody’s busy, so distraught they forget to kill me, and even that won’t keep me alive. I share my home not with horses, but with a little dog who sees poorly at dusk and menaces stumps, makes her muscle known to every statue. I wish she could have a single day of   language, so that I might reassure her don’t be afraid— our whole world is dead and so can do you no harm.

The sky was laced with Irish cream mist, that mellow tan overhanging the hills, which were studded with deathmasks and baskets spilling flowers from both ends. We scanned the haze for lightning. They were studded with earthworks and iron forks inserted between leaves of grass, jacks and bearings and balances, sinuous fingers of pink marble and synovial joints in bronze. But if we got struck by lightning—not a lot; say glanced, or shaved, there was a chance (we heard) it wouldn't be so bad: a little refreshing, a little like La Vita Nuova in a readable translation. "In a flash," as they say, we could acquire a self-renewing subscription to classical music (it's always classical in the scientific literature) accessible at all hours and piped into the forebrain from the hypothalamus. This space available for celebrations. Someone visits for the first time and says, "Oh, let's get married here" and guests drive in and eye the hors d'oeuvre tent before finding a folding chair. But it isn't long before the mirroring going on between, for instance, the sculptures and the trees—the trees looking more like sculptures, the sculptures getting seasoned, growing bark (patinas) even—it isn't long before it hypnotizes the guests. Who would wear a wedding dress in such a charged atmosphere, having heard that ghost story of the wedding dress with the power to possess the soul of the bride? Actually it was a horror flick from somewhere, Tokyo or Calcutta . . . It was a wedding dress that took possession of the soul of its bride the minute she saw it in the mirror, or it saw itself—and this we know happens, but not with the malevolence of this dress that wreaked havoc at the reception, set the hall on fire and dropped a crate of champagne on the string trio. "Aha," cries the groom as he realizes the chrysalis of evil he must divide from his bride: "You are hardly an unruffled surface!" No you would not want to wear that dress amid the wireless network of gigantic sculptures and their wind-scraped murmuring. When the wind stirs, is it not the gardeners? The gardeners are invisible, they don't garden during business hours. As you'd put a dye in the air in order to see it, a bird sucked through its drafts advertises the invisible and upgrades it to naked.

Slow the voice goes slower. Slow the slow rain down. Slow the narrow fellow in the grass stiffens. Now the slow blood stirs. Slow the voice goes slower: Soft lead, soft enough to eat. We dine on soft lead with lampreys. Slow the voice goes down to harden. Slow the silt reaches the bottom, And Davy Jones eats His slow meal of rubber and clay. Slow the slow rain down can rain. Slow the dead is dead. Slow the light, light. Slow the spirit is a bone, Toy from a child’s coffin.

From a documentary on marsupials I learn that a pillowcase makes a fine substitute pouch for an orphaned kangaroo. I am drawn to such dramas of animal rescue. They are warm in the throat. I suffer, the critic proclaims, from an overabundance of maternal genes. Bring me your fallen fledgling, your bummer lamb, lead the abused, the starvelings, into my barn. Advise the hunted deer to leap into my corn. And had there been a wild child— filthy and fierce as a ferret, he is called in one nineteenth-century account— a wild child to love, it is safe to assume, given my fireside inked with paw prints, there would have been room. Think of the language we two, same and not-same, might have constructed from sign, scratch, grimace, grunt, vowel: Laughter our first noun, and our long verb, howl.

My heart aches, and a drowsy numbness pains My sense, as though of hemlock I had drunk, Or emptied some dull opiate to the drains One minute past, and Lethe-wards had sunk: 'Tis not through envy of thy happy lot, But being too happy in thine happiness,— That thou, light-winged Dryad of the trees In some melodious plot Of beechen green, and shadows numberless, Singest of summer in full-throated ease. O, for a draught of vintage! that hath been Cool'd a long age in the deep-delved earth, Tasting of Flora and the country green, Dance, and Provençal song, and sunburnt mirth! O for a beaker full of the warm South, Full of the true, the blushful Hippocrene, With beaded bubbles winking at the brim, And purple-stained mouth; That I might drink, and leave the world unseen, And with thee fade away into the forest dim: Fade far away, dissolve, and quite forget What thou among the leaves hast never known, The weariness, the fever, and the fret Here, where men sit and hear each other groan; Where palsy shakes a few, sad, last gray hairs, Where youth grows pale, and spectre-thin, and dies; Where but to think is to be full of sorrow And leaden-eyed despairs, Where Beauty cannot keep her lustrous eyes, Or new Love pine at them beyond to-morrow. Away! away! for I will fly to thee, Not charioted by Bacchus and his pards, But on the viewless wings of Poesy, Though the dull brain perplexes and retards: Already with thee! tender is the night, And haply the Queen-Moon is on her throne, Cluster'd around by all her starry Fays; But here there is no light, Save what from heaven is with the breezes blown Through verdurous glooms and winding mossy ways. I cannot see what flowers are at my feet, Nor what soft incense hangs upon the boughs, But, in embalmed darkness, guess each sweet Wherewith the seasonable month endows The grass, the thicket, and the fruit-tree wild; White hawthorn, and the pastoral eglantine; Fast fading violets cover'd up in leaves; And mid-May's eldest child, The coming musk-rose, full of dewy wine, The murmurous haunt of flies on summer eves. Darkling I listen; and, for many a time I have been half in love with easeful Death, Call'd him soft names in many a mused rhyme, To take into the air my quiet breath; Now more than ever seems it rich to die, To cease upon the midnight with no pain, While thou art pouring forth thy soul abroad In such an ecstasy! Still wouldst thou sing, and I have ears in vain— To thy high requiem become a sod. Thou wast not born for death, immortal Bird! No hungry generations tread thee down; The voice I hear this passing night was heard In ancient days by emperor and clown: Perhaps the self-same song that found a path Through the sad heart of Ruth, when, sick for home, She stood in tears amid the alien corn; The same that oft-times hath Charm'd magic casements, opening on the foam Of perilous seas, in faery lands forlorn. Forlorn! the very word is like a bell To toll me back from thee to my sole self! Adieu! the fancy cannot cheat so well As she is fam'd to do, deceiving elf. Adieu! adieu! thy plaintive anthem fades Past the near meadows, over the still stream, Up the hill-side; and now 'tis buried deep In the next valley-glades: Was it a vision, or a waking dream? Fled is that music:—Do I wake or sleep?