1630 Nature poems

Highlight Actions Enable or disable annotations For Grace Bulmer Bowers Grace Bulmer Bowers Elizabeth Bishop’s aunt From narrow provinces of fish and bread and tea, home of the long tides where the bay leaves the sea twice a day and takes the herrings long rides, where if the river enters or retreats in a wall of brown foam depends on if it meets the bay coming in, the bay not at home; where, silted red, sometimes the sun sets facing a red sea, and others, veins veins Used as a verb: to extend over or mark with lines, as in the manner of veins the flats’ lavender, rich mud in burning rivulets rivulets A small stream or brook ; on red, gravelly roads, down rows of sugar maples, past clapboard farmhouses and neat, clapboard churches, bleached, ridged as clamshells, past twin silver birches, through late afternoon a bus journeys west, the windshield flashing pink, pink glancing off of metal, brushing the dented flank of blue, beat-up enamel; down hollows, up rises, and waits, patient, while a lone traveller gives kisses and embraces to seven relatives and a collie supervises. Goodbye to the elms, to the farm, to the dog. The bus starts. The light grows richer; the fog, shifting, salty, thin, comes closing in. Its cold, round crystals form and slide and settle in the white hens’ feathers, in gray glazed cabbages, on the cabbage roses and lupins lupins A tall, flowering plant (Lupinus) in the legume family; its seeds (lupin beans) have been used as food like apostles apostles A plant native to Brazil with large, fragrant white and purple flowers ; the sweet peas cling to their wet white string on the whitewashed fences; bumblebees creep inside the foxgloves foxgloves A colorful perennial flower, with cup-shaped buds. , and evening commences. One stop at Bass River Bass River All locations in Nova Scotia near the Bay of Fundy . Then the Economies Economies Locations (Lower Economy, Middle Economy, and Upper Economy) in Nova Scotia near the Bay of Fundy — Lower, Middle, Upper; Five Islands Five Islands All locations in Nova Scotia near the Bay of Fundy , Five Houses Five Houses All locations in Nova Scotia near the Bay of Fundy , where a woman shakes a tablecloth out after supper. A pale flickering. Gone. The Tantramar marshes Tantramar marshes On the Chignecto Isthmus connecting Nova Scotia and New Brunswick, Canada and the smell of salt hay. An iron bridge trembles and a loose plank rattles but doesn’t give way. On the left, a red light swims through the dark: a ship’s port lantern. Two rubber boots show, illuminated, solemn. A dog gives one bark. A woman climbs in with two market bags, brisk, freckled, elderly. “A grand night. Yes, sir, all the way to Boston.” She regards us amicably. Moonlight as we enter the New Brunswick woods, hairy, scratchy, splintery; moonlight and mist caught in them like lamb’s wool on bushes in a pasture. The passengers lie back. Snores. Some long sighs. A dreamy divagation divagations Wanderings begins in the night, a gentle, auditory, slow hallucination.... In the creakings and noises, an old conversation —not concerning us, but recognizable, somewhere, back in the bus: Grandparents’ voices uninterruptedly talking, in Eternity: names being mentioned, things cleared up finally; what he said, what she said, who got pensioned pensioned Dismissed from employment, typically because of age or health; paid a pension. ; deaths, deaths and sicknesses; the year he remarried; the year (something) happened. She died in childbirth. That was the son lost when the schooner foundered schooner foundered A ship that has sunk or filled with water . He took to drink. Yes. She went to the bad. When Amos began to pray even in the store and finally the family had to put him away. “Yes ...” that peculiar affirmative. “Yes ...” A sharp, indrawn breath, half groan, half acceptance, that means “Life’s like that. We know it(also death).” Talking the way they talked in the old featherbed, peacefully, on and on, dim lamplight in the hall, down in the kitchen, the dog tucked in her shawl. Now, it’s all right now even to fall asleep just as on all those nights. —Suddenly the bus driver stops with a jolt, turns off his lights. A moose has come out of the impenetrable wood and stands there, looms, rather, in the middle of the road. It approaches; it sniffs at the bus’s hot hood. Towering, antlerless, high as a church, homely as a house (or, safe as houses safe as houses Totally safe ). A man’s voice assures us “Perfectly harmless....” Some of the passengers exclaim in whispers, childishly, softly, “Sure are big creatures.” “It’s awful plain.” “Look! It’s a she!” Taking her time, she looks the bus over, grand, otherworldly. Why, why do we feel (we all feel) this sweet sensation of joy? “Curious creatures,” says our quiet driver, rolling his r’s. “Look at that, would you.” Then he shifts gears. For a moment longer, by craning backward, the moose can be seen on the moonlit macadam macadam Road, pavement ; then there’s a dim smell of moose, an acrid acrid Pungent, irritating smell of gasoline.

I don't want to be alive anymore. I don't want to be alive enough to want that. One is not meant to turn on one's creator with ferocity expendable in only one way. Or is that exactly how one is meant to turn to burn beyond the love that from beyond being has come to us: Christ's ever unhearable and thus always too bearable scream. In love and dread we learn to listen for beloved dread coming upon us like a whiplash rain we watch through a window. In pain we learn pain. Sometimes amid the rancid moonlight and mindlice of my insomnia there gleams a scalpel blade so clean with meaning so shaped and sharpened to interstellar blue that drawing it —in season due — across my own throat there comes not blood but an ancient answering starlight. Once upon a time in a pleasingly modern slaughterhospice with a view of sky-contempted skyscrapers and Lake Michigan's immaculate sewage my inner skin was skinned mouth to bowels, my soul —deadword, die to find it. For self-pity there must remain a self. Ah, but even shitting one's self one still finds one's self hastening to hide it all from the kind Ukranian nearly bearded night nurse. Fentanyl patches patching my stalactite thighs my diaphanous shoulders the very air eating me like a late leaf that once I would have flourished for a perishable lover or lonelied like some catpiss poignancy into a poem. Dead brain, living will, little pills entangling pain with adoration of it, morphine machine whose little beep (heavenly bell) conjures me to the suddenly more tolerable hallways of hell . . . Lovely Leila, so unsurgically curved, disclosing as she leans to clean my lines a bit of icelace undergarment like the very last trace of a glacier. The brain the brain the brain flickering electrically in and out, in, out— not the mind in which I love my wife whose tightwound nightmind conjures Christ in diapers, for instance, filthy infant, or later, in a mist of adolescent bad weather, bored of wood, dogdead Judea, squawk-box God, some restless absurdity of earth, she says, through which the rest of heaven can come. Once upon a time I walked through the chemical glamour of a night refinery sparking dangerously without and within for beside me under her underclothes undulated an incarnation of creation's finest failure: moonskin to make a young man wince coupled with stifling innocence. Still, we managed. And over the wrought-iron railing of the country club to which neither of us could possibly belong, in the moonskinned pool that seemed both to embody and imbibe her, we improved. And later, out on a green (to be sixteen!) when the starshower I thought was mine was mining me for sweat, muscle, memory to make its own death shine unceasingly inside of me, even unto hell, we excelled. Can it be that her last name was really Key? So much life in this poem so much salvageable and saving love but it is I fear I swear I tear open what heart I have left to keep it from being and beating and bearing down upon me • What rest in faith wrested from grief What truce with truth in bowing down not to the ground of being but simply to the ground Affliction flickers distant now like a structure on fire Love's reprieve moves through me like a breeze But antlike existence crawls all over me Lord and I cry out if you call this vise quiet a cry this riot of needs and genes an I Feelingly among the bones and nerves of sounds I make my scathing way Failingly in church or in the parked car before work I try to pray What might it mean to surrender to the wonder nothing means Not to end with a little flourish of earth Not to end • Love is the living heart of dread Love I love you unto the very edge of being Dead • Something in us suffering touches, teaches first to find little coves in our loves: blank nothings wherein we are what we always were — blank nothings — but changed or rearranged as atoms in the random kingdom of things: hand, we say, or eye, or hair, as if to make ourselves — to stake ourselves — truly there Knowing now not to move in time we are moved by tiger-striped tails bloodfine fins some natureless cerulean one would say thinking oneself out of nature Something in us, suffering, touches, torches, so we may saunter seeingly through an altogether other element, as once in the Shedd Aquarium in Chicago I floated    a moment with my love and the two new lives borne from us who loved best the eensy green almost unfish more like the stars when you close your eyes and whirl open to the whirling grains so freed from things you fall down laughing at the havoc For me for a long time not the minnows mattered but the pattern after: miraculous I didn't think to think: all those mite-eyes and animate instants answering at once to my need and to nothing as if my very nerves worked in finally a saving sense Something in us touches suffering touching us like the constellations of kinetic quiet that bound us beyond us as right to the wall the girls pressed their still-forming faces through which the wild new schools flew almost too green too blue to stand And I held your hand.

More sky please push open the apartment shutters crowbar the paint factory’s broken window frames rip tar paper from the caving roof push it back crack it open blast an airshaft through the neighboring buildings snap it back expose the bird-ridden drafts the wren’s been busy here mornings year-round churr and chip golden open-throat yodel smack in the sleep cycle soldered to feeder suet in ivy like titmouse chickadee refusing to shift it back Carolina Canada climate haywire more sky please rik tik tik break open more light all the way past oil tank farms creosote docks the Kill Van Kull slide by kingfisher flap past cormorant incongruous flights parallel and merging plunge into slap out of tidal pools the Fresh Kills beak full of killifish and silversides crayfish and krill tarp past the salt grass and bridges fly Pulaski Skyway Bayonne’s silver buildings blank tower blocks sky wide as the river mouth more sky more please push it back past tankers and tugboats the last hulking cruise ship lasers fired across a spinning disco ball wobble bass and echo chamber dancing on deck past clanging buoys waveless channels to deepest basin all things even terns drop away sea and sky opened wide and empty

Why do we bother with the rest of the day, the swale of the afternoon, the sudden dip into evening, then night with his notorious perfumes, his many-pointed stars? This is the best— throwing off the light covers, feet on the cold floor, and buzzing around the house on espresso— maybe a splash of water on the face, a palmful of vitamins— but mostly buzzing around the house on espresso, dictionary and atlas open on the rug, the typewriter waiting for the key of the head, a cello on the radio, and, if necessary, the windows— trees fifty, a hundred years old out there, heavy clouds on the way and the lawn steaming like a horse in the early morning.

Morning arrives unannounced by limousine: the tall emaciated chairman of sleeplessness in person steps out on the sidewalk and donning black glasses, ascends the stairs to your building guided by a German shepherd. After a couple faint knocks at the door, he slowly opens the book of blank pages pointing out with a pale manicured finger particular clauses, proof of your guilt.

Opposite him at this table again and through the windows the city glittering, surreal as a scale model, the city in miniature — only it moves in a real way, because it is real. One of the windows is open, some construction down on the street drones like a distant vacuum. It’s warm for January. Still, his apartment has that dreamlike quality of feeling like home though I know it’s not. Not mine anymore — but how many people get to visit the past without hurting anything? To come back and drink the same coffee from the same never-quite-clean cup?

Raised on a cozy diet of conditional love, I learned to emoji from teevee. Now I’m hounded by gripes before my time. Twisted in my genome is this thorn, and all I see are feuds, even swans got boxing gloves for heads. — Ah Ketty-San, why so mori? Maybe you need upgrade of person? History shat on every household. Cop cruisers wand their infrared along bludgeoned homes, demanding boys to spread your cheeks, lift your sac — Now, here’s an alcopop to dull that throb, hide your ugly feelings. I want to love, yes, yet afraid to love since I will be slapped, yet what’s this itch? A fire ant burning to a warring, boiling froth of lust: Slap me, harder, slap me again! — Ketty-San, so Sado Masakumi, so much Sodami Hari Kuri. I sorry.

sun sunwarm sunwarm on back sunwarm on back legs sunwarm on back legs loosens my heart my heart beats my heart beats faster in sunwarm my heart beats faster I flex I flex legs I flex legs loose with sunwarm I drink dew from dripping leaves I beat flex crouch leap! What am I? (grasshopper)

I was climbing up the sliding board When suddenly I felt A mosquito bite my bottom And it raised a big red welt. So I said to that mosquito, “I'm sure you wouldn't mind If I took a pair of tweezers And I tweezered your behind!” He shriveled up his body And he shuffled to his feet, And he said, “I'm awfully sorry But a skeeter's got to eat! Still, there are mosquito manners, And I must have just forgot 'em. And I swear I'll never never never Bite another bottom.” But a minute later Archie Hill And Buck and Theo Brown Were horsing on the monkey bars, Hanging upside down. They must have looked delicious From a skeeter's point of view 'Cause he bit 'em on the bottoms, Archie, Buck and Theo too! You could hear 'em goin' HOLY! You could hear 'em goin' WHACK! You could hear 'em cuss and holler, Goin' smack, smack, smack. A mosquito's awful sneaky, A mosquito's mighty sly, But I never never never Thought a skeeter'd tell a lie.

Mosquito at my ear— does he think I’m deaf?