1630 Nature poems

Across the road from where we nap under a dead elm dazzles the meadow where the partisans strung the traitors up, the meadow which their dangling shadows stain. Belly up in vines a blasted tank rusts flake by flake to lichened scrap iron while horseflies harangue the rippling green, July a limbo of quavering yellow... We wake to cattle lowing at dawn, grass overgrowing summer—so like us in love each hour with the noonday sun that neither toils nor spins, its brightness hovering, blinding us... What would the dead say if they could see us, lounging, talking, peering through brambles at cemetery photographs sunk beneath the undertow of milkweed shadows, death dates smoothing back into the stone? I think of Goya’s demon, old man flesh hanging from his bones, long teeth bared in an ass’s grin as he scrawls on a schoolboy’s slate, What more can be done? Nothing... while behind him a noose etched clean as the moon rises through the inkblot spiraling back into the hanged man’s mouth as if blackness poured from his throat: “When will you tire of us bogeymen, caricatures of your father’s war, our crimes half-forgotten, unforgiven? All future blotted out when they hauled us from our beds, our minds went dead to everything but fear: Nightshirts soaked in snowlight’s pall, we hunched in mud, each step loud, too loud beside the farmhouse wall, the seconds teetering till we drop... What our betrayals were we know with a knowledge intimate beyond revenge, history the needle’s eye you can’t squeeze through. The partisans cut us down, heaped us in a mass grave our relatives dug up: Yes, there were tears—even for us... Now, like aliens from space on your TV shows, we ravel into mist, surrounding you the moment your eyes close... Our pupils search out yours from behind the mirror with your father’s stares, fathers and sons melding in one mind— but who are you to call us traitors, an outsider judging through the smoke-haze of home: Each blow exact, our own neighbors beat us till the blood ran, beat us black and blue...Even now, would they dare take us back, older, wiser, necks broken by the yoke? Moving in time as to a dance we buzz and swarm across the meadow, dissolving and glinting like fireflies in the hedge, blown like milkweed in the moon’s wall eye. But under your lids, you see us locked in cold, shattered wheatstraw flecked in ice: Chill as the night air on your sunburned neck our eyes like X rays pierce the frost, stalking every step the living take.”

Choppers in the night husk the brilliants of thought Beyond the cities of patina grow caves of thought Coyote Hummingbird Owl are rivers of thought The lumens the pumpkins dance: pits of correspondence over the land Birds the dream tongues warble Iroquois Mojav é Ohlone Market Street of “The Mad Doctor” via the occult centers A gang of fox spirits at the crossroads Bandoleros set between the obliteration of grizzly bears painted by an Arcimboldist and the monstrance of bleeding chains Montezuma’s feathery headdress torn up in the boondocks of the Rosy Cross Coyote girls in myth-time At the central dream of edenic treasures The irrevocable annihilation of christian civilization is taking shape with carnivorous flowers of volcanic thought

A canoe made of horse ribs tipped over in the pasture. Prairie flowers took it for a meetinghouse. They grow there with a vengeance. Buck posts float across the flooded swamp Where my father rode in and under. Different horse. He held her head up out of the mud And said how he was sorry Till they came to pull him out. We found the white filly On the only hard ground by the south gate. He said she’d been a ghost from the start and he was right. We covered her with branches. There were things he had the wrong names for Like rose crystals. Though They were about what you’d think from a name like that. He told us somewhere on Sand Creek Pass Was a crystal that spelled our own initials And we should try to find it. We walked through sagebrush and sand currents, looking. He said pasqueflowers and paintbrush Wait till Easter to grow, Then they come up even with snow still on the ground. I thought I’d seen that happen.

All the new thinking is about loss. In this it resembles all the old thinking. The idea, for example, that each particular erases the luminous clarity of a general idea. That the clown- faced woodpecker probing the dead sculpted trunk of that black birch is, by his presence, some tragic falling off from a first world of undivided light. Or the other notion that, because there is in this world no one thing to which the bramble of blackberry corresponds, a word is elegy to what it signifies. We talked about it late last night and in the voice of my friend, there was a thin wire of grief, a tone almost querulous. After a while I understood that, talking this way, everything dissolves:justice, pine, hair, woman, you

What links are ours with orbs that are So resolutely far: The solitary asks, and they Give radiance as from a shield: Still at the death of day, The seen, the unrevealed. Implacable they shine To us who would of Life obtain An answer for the life we strain To nourish with one sign. Nor can imagination throw The penetrative shaft: we pass The breath of thought, who would divine If haply they may grow As Earth; have our desire to know; If life comes there to grain from grass, And flowers like ours of toil and pain; Has passion to beat bar, Win space from cleaving brain; The mystic link attain, Whereby star holds on star. Those visible immortals beam Allurement to the dream: Ireful at human hungers brook No question in the look. For ever virgin to our sense, Remote they wane to gaze intense: Prolong it, and in ruthlessness they smite The beating heart behind the ball of sight: Till we conceive their heavens hoar, Those lights they raise but sparkles frore, And Earth, our blood-warm Earth, a shuddering prey To that frigidity of brainless ray. Yet space is given for breath of thought Beyond our bounds when musing: more When to that musing love is brought, And love is asked of love's wherefore. 'Tis Earth's, her gift; else have we nought: Her gift, her secret, here our tie. And not with her and yonder sky? Bethink you: were it Earth alone Breeds love, would not her region be The sole delight and throne Of generous Deity? To deeper than this ball of sight Appeal the lustrous people of the night. Fronting yon shoreless, sown with fiery sails, It is our ravenous that quails, Flesh by its craven thirsts and fears distraught. The spirit leaps alight, Doubts not in them is he, The binder of his sheaves, the sane, the right: Of magnitude to magnitude is wrought, To feel it large of the great life they hold: In them to come, or vaster intervolved, The issues known in us, our unsolved solved: That there with toil Life climbs the self-same Tree, Whose roots enrichment have from ripeness dropped. So may we read and little find them cold: Let it but be the lord of Mind to guide Our eyes; no branch of Reason's growing lopped; Nor dreaming on a dream; but fortified By day to penetrate black midnight; see, Hear, feel, outside the senses; even that we, The specks of dust upon a mound of mould, We who reflect those rays, though low our place, To them are lastingly allied. So may we read, and little find them cold: Not frosty lamps illumining dead space, Not distant aliens, not senseless Powers. The fire is in them whereof we are born; The music of their motion may be ours. Spirit shall deem them beckoning Earth and voiced Sisterly to her, in her beams rejoiced. Of love, the grand impulsion, we behold The love that lends her grace Among the starry fold. Then at new flood of customary morn, Look at her through her showers, Her mists, her streaming gold, A wonder edges the familiar face: She wears no more that robe of printed hours; Half strange seems Earth, and sweeter than her flowers.

He crawls to the edge of the foaming creek He backs up the slab ledge He puts a finger in the water He turns to a trapped pool Puts both hands in the water Puts one foot in the pool Drops pebbles in the pool He slaps the water surface with both hands He cries out, rises up and stands Facing toward the torrent and the mountain Raises up both hands and shouts three times! VI 69, Kai at Sawmill Lake

Old Meg she was a Gipsy, And liv'd upon the Moors: Her bed it was the brown heath turf, And her house was out of doors. Her apples were swart blackberries, Her currants pods o' broom; Her wine was dew of the wild white rose, Her book a churchyard tomb. Her Brothers were the craggy hills, Her Sisters larchen trees— Alone with her great family She liv'd as she did please. No breakfast had she many a morn, No dinner many a noon, And 'stead of supper she would stare Full hard against the Moon. But every morn of woodbine fresh She made her garlanding, And every night the dark glen Yew She wove, and she would sing. And with her fingers old and brown She plaited Mats o' Rushes, And gave them to the Cottagers She met among the Bushes. Old Meg was brave as Margaret Queen And tall as Amazon: An old red blanket cloak she wore; A chip hat had she on. God rest her aged bones somewhere— She died full long agone!

september is a month like any other and unlike any other. it seems in september everything awaited will arrive: in the calm air, in a particular scent, in the stillness of the quay. when september comes, i know i’m going to lose myself. the ants climbing my legs and a certain change of light tell me so. the air comes and goes beneath my dress, pressing the warm cloth against me, pressing me with the desire to find myself in the sea, that sea beaten deep gray and magnetized by neutrinos, thanks to which i can perform my observations and telekinetic communications. the salty, sticky wall of the Malecón is covered with fish and forgotten hooks. i like to lick its sheen of salt and make my tongue salty and sticky. in that moment the rest of the city can vanish, it’s just that sea and me, before all thought, all desire. then i undress and enter, knowing i’ll find something, and that the boats—which seem suspended on the horizon, seem to have slipped their limits, motionless and painted there—are also mine...when i met you and you met me it was still september and we were strange and different and would be for a long time after—though i sometimes snagged you with certain secret hooks, shaping a sort of formless impression: something strange and indefinable divided the outline of your body from the space around you, but without making a human form, and in your eyes the sunlight revolved like a bicycle’s spoked wheel...the bicycle moves on and i’m carried along, filled with dry branches and coral. in my hair i wear the butterflies we collected together. the little house, one point amid the infinite, comes into view: already we can see the windows, like little black voids, and their curtains beating in the wind. i squeeze your waist, the bicycle moves on; even though the street is narrow the bicycle rolls on, rolls on against the spray. when you turn your head and see my hand, my hook snagged in a struggle of desire, the sun has turned immense in your eyes again. you make for the little house already in view, already at the edge of the curve...a naked man in lamplight is a magnificent animal: his pointy shoulders jut out and cut off the light. a line of fuzz descends from his navel to where the darkness begins, where the skin tightens like the skin of a fig. his body—your body—is an arc i want to tighten, to overcome, to conquer. hidden behind a tree, i can see your eyes again. the Mississippi is a big river with many tributaries. the arc tightens and closes. i throw an arm over you, a leg, a hand, a lip, hallucinations, an ear—as usual. my body moves on. the Mississippi is a big river with many tributaries. its water burns in my thighs, in the course of my dreams: the Mississippi is a deep and torrential river situated in the United States, it is born in Lake Itasca, passes through St. Paul, St. Louis, Memphis, New Orleans, traverses 3,780 kilometers and slides and slides through a wide delta to the Gulf of Mexico. i’m in geography class. i like this class. the world just barely fits in my head. the map hangs before me with its spokes and points. someone made that all up, just to make me think i belong to one of those zones out there. all those castles and fortifications to toy with, the beginnings of everything that seems to be reality, but isn’t, because we’re not outside but inside the globe, that huge globe so stubborn in its sufficiency, and even far from the classroom nothing’s different: there’s just the idea of that transparent globe that is my image of the world, always turning, imperfect and constant inside me. i like the maps and the instability of the geography that situates places in my head. i like using graph paper to plot the latitudes and longitudes i can’t measure. i also like the geography professor, whose eyes i must constantly avoid in order not to drown myself. he doesn’t know, he can’t imagine, that while he lectures, while he looks at me, i draw fish in my notebook to throw in his river. the boy behind me won’t stop looking at me, and whatever one does the others all follow, watching from the corners of their eyes. that’s why i’m going to fold the page away from his gaze and make a true map where he won’t find me, alone at my desk in the middle of the world...in the middle of the lake there’s a boat and we’re three—although the third may have already vanished for us—and i want to paddle and sit in the center. you’ve taken off your shirt: the landscape appears and disappears. when i take the oars you want to teach me how to row over the edge. you try to teach me: you take my hands—you’re behind and above me. my fingers are lost in the middle of the boat. i’m wearing faded jeans and carrying a purple parasol. the oar descends toward the deep and tangles with seaweed. my hair hangs surly and limp on my wet shoulders. we try to steer but go nowhere. you explain the roundness of the earth; the sharpened tip of the compass needle, always precise, marking contours, lines, limits. the shadow and truth of your body in the landscape: appearances and disappearances when you try to comprehend the possible across great distances, the symmetry, forgetfulness, incarnation in other beings: animals, plants, and later, men once again. you taught me all this, but i’m not a map and i hold still. i abandon my shoes and my dread of nearing the end: the oar descends toward the deep, it is september. we don’t move. i keep still to be different, that’s why...

Men say they know many things; But lo! they have taken wings, — The arts and sciences, And a thousand appliances; The wind that blows Is all that any body knows.

She took the words for a stroll and the words bit the children and the children told their parents and the parents loaded their guns and the words wailed, howled slowly licked their blind wounds until they fell flat on their faces onto the bloody earth and death came then dressed in its Sunday best to stop by the poet’s house and call to him with desperate cries and the poet opened the door not knowing what had happened and he saw death hanging from its shadow and sobbing it told him, “Come with me today we’re in mourning” “Who died,” asked the poet “Well, you,” replied death and death extended its arms to him to offer condolences Translated from the Spanish