1630 Nature poems

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?

Four white heifers with sprawling hooves trundle the waggon. Its ill-roped crates heavy with fruit sway. The chisel point of the goad, blue and white, glitters ahead, a flame to follow lance-high in a man’s hand who does not shave. His linen trousers like him want washing. You can see his baked skin through his shirt. He has no shoes and his hat has a hole in it. ‘Hu ! vaca ! Hu ! vaca !’ he says staccato without raising his voice; ‘Adios caballero’ legato but in the same tone. Camelmen high on muzzled mounts boots rattling against the panels of an empty packsaddle do not answer strangers. Each with his train of seven or eight tied head to tail they pass silent but for the heavy bells and plip of slobber dripping from muzzle to dust; save that on sand their soles squeak slightly. Milkmaids, friendly girls between fourteen and twenty or younger, bolt upright on small trotting donkeys that bray (they arch their tails a few inches from the root, stretch neck and jaw forward to make the windpipe a trumpet) chatter. Jolted cans clatter. The girls’ smiles repeat the black silk curve of the wimple under the chin. Their hats are absurd doll’s hats or flat-crowned to take a load. All have fine eyes. You can guess their balanced nakedness under the cotton gown and thin shift. They sing and laugh. They say ‘Adios!’ shyly but look back more than once, knowing our thoughts and sharing our desires and lack of faith in desire.

Home; a place to rest your feet, a place where you can sleep. Man, a place where you can shit, and no one can complain. My Home /el barrio where people rest their feet outside on the fire escapes, where i have a place to sleep with my brothers, sisters, cousins oh yes, and Rover all in the same bed. / where no can smell shit 'cause we've been living in it all our lives (we're immune to its stink) My home; where on hot summer days people gather on the grandstands / the fire escapes and in the box seats/ the stoops and cheer our home gang's stickball team (they call themselves "the new york junkies"). and on those cool summer evenings we hang our legs from the windows / the roofs /      the fire escapes while eating pop corn and sippin coke / or snorting it   / shooting it and watch the Saturday evening gang-fights. yes, this is home /      our paradises and you're always welcomed as long as you're poor. and it was here       / in my home that a butterfly happened to wing by he was easily spotted as a UFO because of all his beautiful colors he flew over the buildings / through the lots / around home plate      a sewer top in the middle of the street he flew in his dance about manner. and i almost cried when i saw children reaching reaching out for him      reaching for hope for love / for that lost dream and he continued dancing /     or maybe flying away away to save his beauty from these love-hungry children he flew        he flew and i cried when he fell down the sewer / now he was part of us.

On a branch floating downriver a cricket, singing.