1630 Nature poems

Four-fifty. The palings of Trinity Church Burying Ground, a few inches above the earth, are sunk in green light. The low stones like pale books knocked sideways. The bus so close to the curb that brush-drops of ebony paint stand out wetly, the sunlight seethes with vibrations, the sidewalks on Whitehall shudder with subterranean tremors. Overhead, faint flickers crackle down the window-paths: limpid telegraphy of the late afternoon July thunderstorm unfurling over Manhattan. Its set and luminous velocity, long stalks of stormlight, and then the first drops strike their light civic stripes on the pavement. Between the palings, oat-panicles sift a few bright grains to the stonecourse. Above it, at shoulder height a side door is flung open, fire-exits; streaming from lobbies come girls and women, white girls in shadowy-striped rayon skirts, plastic ear-hoops, black girls in gauzy-toned nylons, ripples of cornrows and plaits, one girl with shocked-back ash hair, lightened eyebrows; one face from Easter Island, mauve and granitic; thigh on thigh, waist by waist; the elbow’s curlicue and the fingers’; elbow-work, heel-work, are suddenly absorbed in the corduroyed black rubber stairs of the bus. Humid sighs, settlings, each face tilts up to the windows’ shadowless yards of mercuric green plate glass. An interspace then, like the slowing of some rural water-mill, a creaking and dipping pause of black-splintered paddles, the irregularly dappled off-lighting—bottle-green—the lucid slim sluice falling back in a stream from the plank edge. It won’t take us altogether, we say, the mill-race—it won’t churn us up altogether. We’ll keep a glib stretch of leisure water, like our self’s self—to reflect the sky. But we won’t (says the bus rider now to herself). Nothing’s left over, really, from labor. They’ve taken it all for the mill-race. In close-ups now, you can see it in every face, despite the roped rain light pouring down the bus-windows— it’s the strain of gravity itself, of life hours cut off and offered to the voice that says “Give me this day your life, that is LABOR, and I’ll give you back one day, then another. For mine are the terms.” It’s gravity, spilling in capillaries, cheek-tissue trembling, despite the make-up, the monograms, the mass-market designer scarves, the army of signs disowning the workplace and longing for night ... But even as the rain slackens, labor lengthens itself along Broadway. The night signs come on, that wit has set up to draw money: O’DONNELL’S, BEIRUT CAFE, YONAH’S KNISH

Piute Creek, August 1955 “O hell, what do mine eyes with grief behold?” Working with an old Singlejack miner, who can sense The vein and cleavage In the very guts of rock, can Blast granite, build Switchbacks that last for years Under the beat of snow, thaw, mule-hooves. What use, Milton, a silly story Of our lost general parents, eaters of fruit? The Indian, the chainsaw boy, And a string of six mules Came riding down to camp Hungry for tomatoes and green apples. Sleeping in saddle-blankets Under a bright night-sky Han River slantwise by morning. Jays squall Coffee boils In ten thousand years the Sierras Will be dry and dead, home of the scorpion. Ice-scratched slabs and bent trees. No paradise, no fall, Only the weathering land The wheeling sky, Man, with his Satan Scouring the chaos of the mind. Oh Hell! Fire down Too dark to read, miles from a road The bell-mare clangs in the meadow That packed dirt for a fill-in Scrambling through loose rocks On an old trail All of a summer’s day.

When the mink ran across the meadow in bunched black parabolas, I thought sine and cosine, but no — the movement never dips below the line. The creature vanished into barberries. Absolute predator who cracks a rabbit’s spine in one bite. And my mind leapt along a track to a summer field where I walked years ago to a stony spit out into the North Atlantic with a young man I hardly knew, and his sister. He was bald, dying of a brain tumor. I ignored his illness and we spoke of history. He was gentle, scholarly. Why do I remember him when it was his sister I painted seated in tall grass, her forehead wide, brown hair framing her face, ocean a cobalt swatch behind? Islands humped in little arcs across the bay. That canvas is stacked in a closet. But it’s the dead boy I’ve stored inside me all these years, scared of the otherworldly light around his eyes. Scared and ashamed of what I didn’t know. Ashamed of my fear that made his death, when it came, unspeakable. So history bounds into the present, glitter-eyed, with musky anal glands and daggering eyeteeth. Because that boy wasn’t dead: he must be killed again.

Whatever the cost I pay up at the minnow pools. I don’t know anything of the misery of these trapped fish, or the failure of the marsh I’m so hidden. Up above is the island with its few houses facing the ocean God walks with anyone there. I often slosh through the low tide to a sister unattached to causeways. It’s where deer mate then lead their young by my house to fields, again up above me. Pray for me. Like myself be lost. An amulet under your chest, a green sign of the first rose you ever saw, the first shore. Then I wash my horse, dogs, me behind the barn. Only the narrow way leads home.

Because hairs on their speckled daybeds baffle the little bees, foxgloves come out to advertise for rich bumbling hummers, who crawl into their tunnels-of-delight with drunken ease (see Darwin’s chapters on his foxglove summers) plunging over heckles caked with sex-appealing stuff to sip from every hooker its intoxicating liquor and stop it propagating in a corner with itself. And this is how the foxflower keeps its sex life in order. Two anthers—adolescent, in a hurry to dehisce— let fly too soon, so pollen lies in drifts around the floor. Along swims bumbler bee and makes an undercoat of this, reverses, exits, lets it fall by accident next door. So ripeness climbs the bells of Digitalis, flower by flower, undistracted by a Mind, or a Design, or by desire.

Sitting under the mistletoe (Pale-green, fairy mistletoe), One last candle burning low, All the sleepy dancers gone, Just one candle burning on, Shadows lurking everywhere: Some one came, and kissed me there. Tired I was; my head would go Nodding under the mistletoe (Pale-green, fairy mistletoe), No footsteps came, no voice, but only, Just as I sat there, sleepy, lonely, Stooped in the still and shadowy air Lips unseen—and kissed me there.

A woman’s hallelujah! washes the foot of Mocking Bird Hill, her face eclipsed by her black mouth, her eyes rolled up like workman’s sleeves. Stirred up, a fly speaks in the tongue of the hotel doorbell, where, on the sun-ridden straw terrace my salvation means less than praise to a dumb child. Damned, blinded by ice cubes, the fly surrenders its life into the waiter’s clean hands. Behind the kitchen of the Mocking Bird Hotel a rooster repeats hallelujah! until it loses its head. A man harvests the Family Tree before his forefathers’ features have a chance to ripen on their faces. Parakeets watch him from the bare nerves of the garden. He harvests before the worms that eat his father turn into demons. Do not eat the fruit from your Family Tree. You have eyes not to see them, hands not to pick them, teeth not to bite them, tongue not to taste them even in speech. The waiter slashes the table with our bill. We descend Mocking Bird Hill without raising dust. Dogs, their fur hanging like wet feathers off their backs, piss yellow smoke without lifting a leg. Gulls smash their heads between their wings. Light lays the eggs of shadows under the shrubs. Produce shacks stand empty like football gates. What appeared blue from afar, turns green. I hold it all in, even my own urine. But the mother of vowels slumps from my throat like the queen of a havocked beehive. Higher than hallelujah! rising like smoke over the hill, I scream at the top of that green lung, why, in the Mocking Bird Hell, do you value your blood over your sweat, that bitterness over this salt, that wound over this crystal? But often, to shed light on the darkness, light isn’t enough. Often what I need is even a darker darkness. Like in those hours before the sun incriminates this hotel, his two nostrils that illuminate our benighted bodies.

No other song or swoop (part quiver, part swivel and plash) with tour de force stray the course note liquefactions (its new, bawdy air an aria hangs in) en- thralls, trills, loops, soars, startles, out-warbles, out-brawns, more juicily, lifts up the dawn, outlaws from sackcloth, the cool sloth of bed sheets, from pillows and silks and blue-quilted, feminine bolsters, fusses of coverlets; nips as the switch of a juvenile willow, fuzz of a nettle, to window and window and window and ever toward egress, to flurry, pollen and petal shed, to wet street and wet pavement, all sentiment intemperate, all sentience ephemeral.

I can hear him, now, even in darkness, a trickster under the moon, bristling his feathers, sounding as merry as a man whistling in a straw hat, or a squeaky gate to the playground, left ajar or the jingling of a star, having wandered too far from the pasture.

How perfectly he has mastered the car alarm, jangling us from sleep. Later his staccato scatters smaller birds that landed on the wire beside him. Perhaps the key to success is imitation, not originality. Once, when the cat slinked up the orange tree and snatched a hatchling, the mockingbird turned on us, marked us for revenge. For two whole weeks he dive bombed whenever I ventured out the screen door lured by his call: first tricked into thinking the soft coo was a mourning dove courting, next drawn by the war cry of a far larger animal. He swooped from one splintered eave, his mate from the other, aiming to peck out my eyes, to wrestle the baby from my arms, to do God knows what with that newborn.