1630 Nature poems

Intractable between them grows a garden of barbed wire and roses. Burning briars like flames devour their too innocent attire. Dare they meet, the blackened wire tears the intervening air. Trespassers have wandered through texture of flesh and petals. Dogs like arrows moved along pathways that their noses knew. While the two who laid it out find the metal and the flower fatal underfoot. Black and white at midnight glows this garden of barbed wire and roses. Doused with darkness roses burn coolly as a rainy moon: beneath a rainy moon or none silver the sheath on barb and thorn. Change the garden, scale and plan; wall it, make it annual. There the briary flower grew. There the brambled wire ran. While they sleep the garden grows, deepest wish annuls the will: perfect still the wire and rose.

Out of the golden West, out of the leaden East, into the iron South, and to the silver North . . . Oh metals metals everywhere, forks and knives, belt buckles and hooks . . . When you are beaten you sing. You do not give anyone a chance . . . You come out of the earth and fly with men. You lodge in men. You hurt them terribly. You tear them. You do not care for anyone. Oh metals metals, why are you always hanging about? Is it not enough that you hold men’s wrists? Is it not enough that we let you in our mouths? Why is it you will not do anything for yourself? Why is it you always wait for men to show you what to be? And men love you. Perhaps it is because you soften so often. You did, it is true, pour into anything men asked you to. It has always proved you to be somewhat softer than you really are. Oh metals metals, why are you always filling my house? You are like family, you do not care for anyone.

Down valley a smoke haze Three days heat, after five days rain Pitch glows on the fir-cones Across rocks and meadows Swarms of new flies. I cannot remember things I once read A few friends, but they are in cities. Drinking cold snow-water from a tin cup Looking down for miles Through high still air.

It is too early for white boughs, too late For snows. From out the hedge the wind lets fall A few last flakes, ragged and delicate. Down the stripped roads the maples start their small, Soft, ’wildering fires. Stained are the meadow stalks A rich and deepening red. The willow tree Is woolly. In deserted garden-walks The lean bush crouching hints old royalty, Feels some June stir in the sharp air and knows Soon ’twill leap up and show the world a rose. The days go out with shouting; nights are loud; Wild, warring shapes the wood lifts in the cold; The moon’s a sword of keen, barbaric gold, Plunged to the hilt into a pitch black cloud.

‘Are you asleep?’ Like a door that always opens on the same empty closet, the old jokey question you can never answer ‘yes’ to is a snap, in comparison to ‘Where are you?’ Moving, wherever you are. Even your stillness on the back seat takes the bent of action, a kicking reach through swells and drifts of afghan. My live question mark, are they salt or sweet, the waters you riddle? Asking gets me as far as ladling water with a net. Though I can catch your small beached foot, and hear soft waves of breath, the mesh of senses isn’t fine enough to land you now. When you come back, you’ll rub the sand from your eyes and know nothing of where you’ve been. Love is like that: the element we breathe and move through, untouchable and always there.

On nights like this we used to swim in the quarry, the boys making up games requiring them to tear off  the girls’ clothes and the girls cooperating, because they had new bodies since last summer and they wanted to exhibit them, the brave ones leaping off  the high rocks — bodies crowding the water. The nights were humid, still. The stone was cool and wet, marble for  graveyards, for buildings that we never saw, buildings in cities far away. On cloudy nights, you were blind. Those nights the rocks were dangerous, but in another way it was all dangerous, that was what we were after. The summer started. Then the boys and girls began to pair off but always there were a few left at the end — sometimes they’d keep watch, sometimes they’d pretend to go off  with each other like the rest, but what could they do there, in the woods? No one wanted to be them. But they’d show up anyway, as though some night their luck would change, fate would be a different fate. At the beginning and at the end, though, we were all together. After the evening chores, after the smaller children were in bed, then we were free. Nobody said anything, but we knew the nights we’d meet and the nights we wouldn’t. Once or twice, at the end of summer, we could see a baby was going to come out of all that kissing. And for those two, it was terrible, as terrible as being alone. The game was over. We’d sit on the rocks smoking cigarettes, worrying about the ones who weren’t there. And then finally walk home through the fields, because there was always work the next day. And the next day, we were kids again, sitting on the front steps in the morning, eating a peach.  Just that, but it seemed an honor to have a mouth. And then going to work, which meant helping out in the fields. One boy worked for an old lady, building shelves. The house was very old, maybe built when the mountain was built. And then the day faded. We were dreaming, waiting for night. Standing at the front door at twilight, watching the shadows lengthen. And a voice in the kitchen was always complaining about the heat, wanting the heat to break. Then the heat broke, the night was clear. And you thought of  the boy or girl you’d be meeting later. And you thought of  walking into the woods and lying down, practicing all those things you were learning in the water. And though sometimes you couldn’t see the person you were with, there was no substitute for that person. The summer night glowed; in the field, fireflies were glinting. And for those who understood such things, the stars were sending messages: You will leave the village where you were born and in another country you’ll become very rich, very powerful, but always you will mourn something you left behind, even though you can’t say what it was, and eventually you will return to seek it.

I. I am a man.  I’ve lived alone.  I’ve been  in  love.  I’ve  played  with fire, cursed the telephone, and basked in verse, in verve, and also Humid,     terrestrial,     mixed,     nongenderspecific, have   occasionally day’s  tumult  ushers  in   an evening with  a  lone moved  a  woman’s shut   icecream   stand,   false  promises  of  cone heart,  although  I also, and  scoop  near  Central  Park.   Juneific famously,  had  such  an awk- are   the   silhouettes  of   people  dreaming  by, ward   start.  Amazed  at lips,   lit   cigarette   tips,   thoughts  and  tulips  streaming  by how  much along   dimly   hospitable   park   lamps  toward  eleven symmetry  a  life with  an  occasional   rev   of   internal   combustion can  still  support,  I wafted   across   from   nearabouts. stare  in  rapt  near-idiocy,  like  a “What’s   this   you  are  talking  about,  Sarah?” foreign   passport, and you   hear  a  voice,  and   the  reply,  “I’m  sorry. April’s   Persian  lilacs but  what  was  I  supposed  to  do?”  Two   bats all  bloom  straight  into dash   through   a  silver  stretch  of  atmosphere. my  face,  and  various What   she   was  supposed  to  do   we  never  hear, other   blossom, too, depending on each case, while  you  are  softly  tangible, while  you are sweetly mine. We’re existentially  wise,  we’re  mortally divine. II. All whispers  know  where  whispers  go  and  lusters  where  with lusters flow, and when your palm is in my palm, just as my poem There  is   a  sparkling   tone  to  how  you   speak, is  in  your  poem,  look a   quickness   to   your   whisper,   an   implied at   this   stellar,  cellular, correctness   in   your   ironies.   We   stride organic   life   of   mine,   the along   emphatic   benches   in   the   weak general  and  particular,  the light   bristling   eloquent   dark.  Pine,   elm  and  oak gross  (as  well   as fall  silent  now  to  hear  you  tell  a  joke— fine)  intentions  I  epitomize. something  about  a  man  and  a   mandrake; Look,  seeing  through  its I think  it  cute  and  laugh  like  Captain  Drake. thin disguise the bleary We  then  explore  the  vagaries  of  light sky  whose   weepy  eyes  have found  underfoot  by  lamps,  and  kiss.  “Beatrix, rained   us  a  surprise. will    you   still   need   me  when   I’m   thirty-six?" A    lightning    bolt’s You   favorably   mumble  that  you  might, protruding  hand  snatched and  throw  a  willing  arm  around  my  nape. past us,  far and brief and I reassure you that there’s no escape. as  I  hold  you  in  my  arms,  you fill me with belief. Don’t wonder if and how, much  stranger  than right now, the  hyacinth of  sorrow may blossom  forth tomorrow. III. The  stars  in  liquid  decadence  reclaim  their  lost  positions, all knotty dispositions dissolved in limpid dance. They offer us their Another   couple   floats  up  through  thickened  ink stardom.   Oh,   we into  the  field  of  vision,  to  redissolve could  sympathize  with  them, leaving  a  thin  trail  of   perfume  and  love but   instead,  we   set  eyes and   visual   recollection  in   the  pink. with   them  upon  that  higher Cicadas   cataract  from  tree  to  tree. tsardom,  that  real  of  love  and A mock  nightingale  trills,  then  two,  then  three. reason.  Our  lengthy We  cut   short  across  grass  and  leaves  (then  four), cigarettes  crackle encountering   no  one  on  our  slight  detour with   dry  regrets  during where,   negligibly   burdened   with  a   sixpack, the  rainy   season,  but a  master  and  his  bulldog  rustle  on, we  ignore  their  humors, their a   small   red   light   fixed   to   her   furry   back. melancholy  murmurs, We  are  too  busy  with  our  love  to  see  them. decline   ascetic  rigors, Tomorrow   we’ll   be   going   back   to  Boston. welcome  straight  facts, Three   cheers   for   Central   Park  at   height   of   season. clear    figures, where   laws  concerning  numbers  come  plumed  with  midnight sounds, and spirits  stir  from  slumbers  like  angels out of clouds.

The earth had wanted us all to itself. The mountains wanted us back for themselves. The numbered valleys of serpentine wanted us; that’s why it happened as it did, the split as if one slow gear turned beneath us. . . Then the Tuesday shoppers paused in the street and the tube that held the trout-colored train and the cords of action from triangular buildings and the terraced gardens that held camelias shook and shook, each flower a single thought. Mothers and children took cover under tables. I called out to her who was my life. From under the table—I hid under the table that held the begonia with the fiery stem, the stem that had been trying to root, that paused in its effort—I called to the child who was my life. And understood, in the endless instant before she answered, how Pharaoh’s army, seeing the ground break open, seeing the first fringed horses fall into the gap, made their vows, that each heart changes, faced with a single awe and in that moment a promise is written out. However we remember California later the earth we loved will know the truth: that it wanted us back for itself with our mighty forms and our specific longings, wanted them to be air and fire but they wouldn’t; the kestrel circled over a pine, which lasted, the towhee who loved freedom, gathering seed during the shaking lasted, the painting released by the wall, the mark and hook we placed on the wall, and the nail, and the memory of driving the nail in, these also lasted—

Victor gets a real sense of power from making his own raisins. He buys pounds and pounds of grapes and leaves them to dry on the kitchen table. Theresa doesn’t want to hear about her ex-husband’s cancer. Not on Father’s Day. She takes a train all night to have breakfast with her cousin. All Sunday she rides the train back. Once Martin’s wife had left, he decided to take advantage of her space. He built a sauna where her closet was, and now sits there every morning to read the paper and Buddha. One night Helga wore her prettiest dress, thought she knew he wouldn’t be there. She drank white wine, got drunk (she was on a diet), and fell down. Later he saw the holes in her pantyhose. María was usually bumping into furniture. Each time she got closer to what she wanted. “What do you want from me?” “Nothing,” he replied, so she took off and felt like migrating birds. But many.

I tell myself softly,this is how love begins— the air alive with something inconceivable, seeds of every imaginable possibility floating across the wet grasses, under the thin arms of ferns. It drifts like snow or old ash, settling on the dust of the roadways as you and I descend into thickets, flanked by the fragrance of honeysuckle and white primrose. I recall how my grandmother imagined these wanderers were living beings, some tiny phylum yet to be classified as life. She would say they reminded her of maidens decked in white dresses, waltzing through air. Even after I showed her the pods from which they sprang, blossoming like tiny spiders, she refused to believe. Now, standing beside you in the crowded autumn haze, I watch them flock, emerge from brittle stalks, bursting upon the world as young lovers do—trysting in the tall grasses, resting fingers lightly in tousled hair. Listen, and you can hear them whisper in the rushes, gazing out at us, wondering— what lives are these?