1630 Nature poems

The moon came late to a lonesome bog, And there sat Goggleky Gluck, the frog. ‘My stars!’ she cried, and veiled her face, ‘What very grand people they have in this place!’

Moon has dusks for walls, October’s days for a floor, crickets for rooms, windy halls. Only one night is her door. When I was thirteen she found me, spiralled into my blood like a hive. I stood on a porch where she wound me for the first time, tight and alive, till my body flooded to find her: to know I would not be alone as I moved through the tides that don't bind her into womanhood, like a flung stone. With each curve that waxed into fullness I grew to her, ready and wild. I filled myself up like her priestess. I emptied myself like her child. Flooding, ready, and certain, I hid her—full, fallow, or frail— beneath each long summer's rich curtain. It covered her face—the thin grail that delivers me now. Now I’m with her. All cast shadows come home. I stand in these shadows to kiss her; I spin in her cool, calming storm. Now as I move through my own beauty and my shadow grows deeper than blood, oh triple, oh goddess, sustain me with your light’s simple opening hood.

1. Here, shooting stars linger They give out A sparkling trail like a cauterized incision Silver, or amber If the moon is low and rising red 2. And the rain melts the roads And the roads Can rupture a spleen Or oust a kidney stone As for the heart It needs a beginning The narrative Burden of events 3. “Mize, zey eat mize” The Frenchman exclaimed with a smile “Rraized and shipped from za States” We raise rats! I thought That’s a lot of protein! “Maize maize!” it was, after our chickens Have had their fill 4. She was the only nurse in town before the war She spoke seven languages and died suddenly He was a merchant He’s a doorman now and buys us cigarettes 5. Here we are with love pouring out of every orifice Here they are dancing Around the funeral pyre, the corpse in absentia 6. One of the drivers ran over the neighbor’s ducks The neighbor demanded compensation For the post-traumatic stress disorder he accurately anticipates Do you know what it’s like To drive on roads occupied By animal farms: you cannot tell Who killed who or how Many ducks were there to begin with 7. In the morning, elephant grass moves the way Mist is visible in the breeze but doesn’t dampen the skin 8. Today, I yelled at three old women Who wouldn’t stop bargaining for pills they didn’t need One wanted extra For her grandson who came along for the ride 9. Like lip sores The asphalt blisters in the rain And the boys Fill the holes with dirt and gravel And broken green branches Then wait: No windex. No flowers or newspapers And gratuity is appreciated 10. “I have ants in my leg” And “My leg went to sleep” Are not the same thing! The French argue There is no sleep in a tingling numbness The symptom of sluggish blood: I agree. Me too my leg has been anted And we are learning to reconcile The dark with the electric 11. Four days the river runs to the border Nine days to learn it wasn’t the shape Of your nose that gave you away And debts are paid off in a-shelter-for-a-day A pile of wood plus change in your pocket Is a sack of potatoes and change in another’s 12. No more running long or short distance The old women Snicker at me when I pass them by 13. She was comatose post-partum And the beekeeper Bathed her in love everyday When she recovered I gave up What he’d promised me for the woman Who took up nursing their newborn Since as coincidence would have it Her name was Om Assel— Mother of Honey 14. The translation of a medical interview Is not a poem to be written Come recite a verse from childhood with me I see you’re unable to weep, does love Have no command over you? The sea’s like the desert Neither quenches the thirst 15. Here, dry grass burns the moon Here, a clearing of grass is a clearing of snakes 16. And the rain has already been cleansed from the sky The clinic is empty, soon The earth will unseal like a jar Harvest is the season that fills the belly 17. Here, I ride my bicycle invisible Except for a crescent shadow and the Milky Way Is already past 18. And a mirror gives the moon back to the moon Home is an epilogue: Which came first Memory or words?

The Moon is distant from the Sea – And yet, with Amber Hands – She leads Him – docile as a Boy – Along appointed Sands – He never misses a Degree – Obedient to Her eye – He comes just so far – toward the Town – Just so far – goes away – Oh, Signor, Thine, the Amber Hand – And mine – the distant Sea – Obedient to the least command Thine eye impose on me –

Milly Sorensen, January 16, 1922 - February 19, 2004 It was the moonflowers that surprised us. Early summer we noticed the soft gray foliage. She asked for seedpods every year but I never saw them in her garden. Never knew what she did with them. Exotic and tropical, not like her other flowers. I expected her to throw them in the pasture maybe, a gift to the coyotes. Huge, platterlike white flowers shining in the night to soften their plaintive howling. A sound I love; a reminder, even on the darkest night, that manicured lawns don't surround me. Midsummer they shot up, filled the small place by the back door, sprawled over sidewalks, refused to be ignored. Gaudy and awkward by day, by night they were huge, soft, luminous. Only this year, this year of her death did they break free of their huge, prickly husks and brighten the darkness she left.

Your soul is like a landscape fantasy, Where masks and Bergamasks, in charming wise, Strum lutes and dance, just a bit sad to be Hidden beneath their fanciful disguise. Singing in minor mode of life’s largesse And all-victorious love, they yet seem quite Reluctant to believe their happiness, And their song mingles with the pale moonlight, The calm, pale moonlight, whose sad beauty, beaming, Sets the birds softly dreaming in the trees, And makes the marbled fountains, gushing, streaming— Slender jet-fountains—sob their ecstasies.

Called out of dream by the pitch and screech, I awoke to see my mother’s hair set free of its pincurls, springing out into the still and hurtling air above the front seat and just as suddenly gone. The space around us twisted, and in the instant before the crash I heard the bubbling of the chickens, the homely racket they make at all speeds, signifying calm, resignation, oblivion. And I listened. All through the slash and clatter, the rake of steel, shatter of glass, I listened, and what came was a blizzard moan in the wind, a wail of wreckage, severed hoses and lives, a storm of loose feathers, and in the final whirl approximating calm, the cluck and fracas of the birds. I crawled on hands and knees where a window should have been and rose uneven in November dusk. Wind blew a snow of down, and rows of it quivered along the shoulder. One thin stream of blood oozed, flocked in feathers. This was in the Ozarks, on a road curving miles around Missouri, and as far as I could see, no light flickered through the timber, no mail box leaned the flag of itself toward pavement, no cars seemed ever likely to come along. So I walked, circled the darkening disaster my life had come to, and cried. I cried for my family there, knotted in the snarl of metal and glass; for the farmer, looking dead, half in and half out of his windshield; and for myself, ambling barefoot through the jeweled debris, glass slitting little blood-stars in my soles, my arm hung loose at the elbow and whispering its prophecies of pain. Around and around the tilted car and the steaming truck, around the heap of exploded crates, the smears and small hunks of chicken and straw. Through an hour of loneliness and fear I walked, in the almost black of Ozark night, the moon just now burning into Missouri. Behind me, the chickens followed my lead, some fully upright, pecking the dim pavement for suet or seed, some half-hobbled by their wounds, worthless wings fluttering in the effort. The faintest light turned their feathers phosphorescent, and as I watched they came on, as though they believed me some savior, some highwayman or commando come to save them the last night of their clucking lives. This, they must have believed, was the end they’d always heard of, this the rendering more efficient than the axe, the execution more anonymous than a wringing arm. I walked on, no longer crying, and soon the amiable and distracted chattering came again, a sound like chuckling, or the backward suck of hard laughter. And we walked to the cadence their clucking called, a small boy towing a cloud around a scene of death, coming round and round like a dream, or a mountain road, like a pincurl, like pulse, like life.

That night the moon rose in the window. Its light touched the pane and spread over the floor. The girls climbed out of their beds and gathered in the glow, where their hands came alive. Their chatter filled their chests with such gladness it flowed out past the sentry girl at the door and down the corridor until it struck the matron’s ears. She rocked forward, enraged, and thundered up the corridor. The sentry girl gave the alarm. They flew for their beds. The matron burst in. Her arm swung and connected. A girl dropped. The hand of the moon went to the girl, tapping her on the shoulder, tapping to no avail. It withdrew, gliding back to the window and out. When the sun came up, its blaze seething into the floor, the girls gathered again at the window. They watched as the gardener dug a hole. His shovel thrust firmly in the ground, he lifted a covered figure and let drop. Its arms were crossed as it tumbled to the bottom. The gardener grimaced and covered the hole. That night the moon rose in the window. Its light touched the pane and spread over the floor. The girls climbed out of their beds and gathered in the glow, where their hands came alive. Translated from the American Sign Language

This is what I see: a grain of wheat in the hand of a small boy barefoot on the unnamed roads, sleeping in the dream another is having. An oud, a violin, a guitar, a mirror of dew, a man about to undress, a woman staring. A traveler returning everywhere and forgetfulness stealing from itself. Maktoub, the Moor says, we hold clouds in our mouth and imagine God in our breath.

There are times when all the chutzpa I can muster isn't enough, fug and bluster all I can do, and damned if it doesn't just stand there, legs straddling a berm of washboard dust-ruts and in late noon sun stare me blue in the face: lord, we could almost trade places, my back strained by the weight of those great bone wings, my tongue itching for lily root. And musk, lord, the pheromones, a day so sweet with elderberry's too rank fume I could die twice over snuffing. While the truck mumbles and a trout spanks the cooler, I almost outdo myself. But reason, that too-convenient shortcut, creeps back, if only so far: the rest as we say is silence, dust and the sputter of flies and when lumbering to go it pauses and throws me its last worst look its sorrow is Christ's, dewlap jeweled, a beatitude of moss.