1630 Nature poems

I see the mosquito kneeling on the soft underside of my arm, kneeling Like a fruitpicker, kneeling like an old woman With the proboscis of her prayer buried in the idea of God, And I know we shall not speak with the aliens And that peace will not happen in my life, not unless It is in the burnt oil spreading across the surfaces of ponds, in the dark Egg rafts clotting and the wiggletails expiring like batteries. Bring a little alcohol and a little balm For these poppies planted by the Queen of Neptune. In her photographs she is bearded and spurred, embellished five hundred times, Her modular legs crouching, her insufferable head unlocking To lower the razor-edge of its tubes, and she is there in the afternoon When the wind gives up the spirit of cleanliness And there rises from the sound the brackish oyster and squid smell of creation. I lie down in the sleeping bag sodden with rain. Nights with her, I am loved for myself, for the succulent Flange of my upper lip, the twin bellies of my eyelids. She adores the easy, the soft. She picks the tenderest blossoms of insomnia. Mornings while the jackhammer rips the pavement outside my window, While the sanitation workers bang the cans against the big truck and shout to each other over the motor, I watch her strut like an udder with my blood, Imagining the luminous pick descending into Trotsky’s skull and the eleven days I waited for the cold chill, nightmare, and nightsweat of malaria; Imagining the mating call in the vibrations of her wings, And imagining, in the simple knot of her ganglia, How she thrills to my life, how she sings for the harvest.

When did you start your tricks Monsieur? What do you stand on such high legs for? Why this length of shredded shank You exaltation? Is it so that you shall lift your centre of gravity upwards And weigh no more than air as you alight upon me, Stand upon me weightless, you phantom? I heard a woman call you the Winged Victory In sluggish Venice. You turn your head towards your tail, and smile. How can you put so much devilry Into that translucent phantom shred Of a frail corpus? Queer, with your thin wings and your streaming legs How you sail like a heron, or a dull clot of air, A nothingness. Yet what an aura surrounds you; Your evil little aura, prowling, and casting a numbness on my mind. That is your trick, your bit of filthy magic: Invisibility, and the anæsthetic power To deaden my attention in your direction. But I know your game now, streaky sorcerer. Queer, how you stalk and prowl the air In circles and evasions, enveloping me, Ghoul on wings Winged Victory. Settle, and stand on long thin shanks Eyeing me sideways, and cunningly conscious that I am aware, You speck. I hate the way you lurch off sideways into air Having read my thoughts against you. Come then, let us play at unawares, And see who wins in this sly game of bluff. Man or mosquito. You don't know that I exist, and I don't know that you exist. Now then! It is your trump It is your hateful little trump You pointed fiend, Which shakes my sudden blood to hatred of you: It is your small, high, hateful bugle in my ear. Why do you do it? Surely it is bad policy. They say you can't help it. If that is so, then I believe a little in Providence protecting the innocent. But it sounds so amazingly like a slogan A yell of triumph as you snatch my scalp. Blood, red blood Super-magical Forbidden liquor. I behold you stand For a second enspasmed in oblivion, Obscenely ecstasied Sucking live blood My blood. Such silence, such suspended transport, Such gorging, Such obscenity of trespass. You stagger As well as you may. Only your accursed hairy frailty Your own imponderable weightlessness Saves you, wafts you away on the very draught my anger makes in its snatching. Away with a pæan of derision You winged blood-drop. Can I not overtake you? Are you one too many for me Winged Victory? Am I not mosquito enough to out-mosquito you? Queer, what a big stain my sucked blood makes Beside the infinitesimal faint smear of you! Queer, what a dim dark smudge you have disappeared into!

Mosquitoes, with needle-noses sucking blood from elbows, cheeks, and chin why were you not designed to thrive on brine, on swine, or likewise-spiny porcupines? SLAP! SLAP! SLAP!

Somewhere outside Kyoto's line, she said, they stumbled across the famous garden of moss, the smallish sign so plain it could have been overlooked. No temple, only moss. So they entered the walkway with little expectation, the silence creeping in, much like expectation. Instead of leading them to the garden directly, two monks had led them to a different task, requested they copy three hundred characters, the ink and paper set down for the task. And this, too, was a practiced form of prayer, left behind for those who had forgotten prayer. The monks left brushes, ink, and bowls of water. They asked the seekers to write, to pray. But prayer, any prayer, wasn't easy. The brush and ink, the doubting hand, made not for simple prayer. And even as I write this, I do not want to pray. This story changes nothing; I do not want to pray.

But for a low bank of cloud, clear morning, empty sky. The bright band of light beneath the cloud’s gray I thought at first was open distance, but it’s ice that by extension raised the lake above the lip of blue lake and spilled it farther out than that horizon along the sky and floods the clouds. Seeing the distant level further unfurl into the sky says not to trust blue line as terminus when a meniscus of ice can ride up that wall of the skyline, a measure of illusion how close the eye can be to filled with seeing, to widen instead the tube of that measure of sight we are given. There is the larger lake the wider look we open eyes to see. That glance of the lip put in a bigger cylinder falls away, but how much deeper the spring to fill the cup. As if the surface we are seeing drops the more seeing is added, while we feel the stories well as our height from which to see. And watch the dawns coming. …I seem to be emptying of time the more time I put in, and see like a man with weathered eyes enough to face to face up to the sight’s field expanded to insight. To the dark the lake can turn and curl up like a map for poems to have these likenesses to graph, then come un-scrolled from semblance back to just this lake. Water cities are led to layout beside. But never in stillness; always the restoration to change, from ice, from cloud, turning to clear liquid—as is most of our body water— thinned sheet, layer that if written on or with, a bearing a name chiseled on water disappears.

The south-wind strengthens to a gale, Across the moon the clouds fly fast, The house is smitten as with a flail, The chimney shudders to the blast. On such a night, when Air has loosed Its guardian grasp on blood and brain, Old terrors then of god or ghost Creep from their caves to life again; And Reason kens he herits in A haunted house. Tenants unknown Assert their squalid lease of sin With earlier title than his own. Unbodied presences, the pack’d Pollution and remorse of Time, Slipp’d from oblivion reënact The horrors of unhouseld crime. Some men would quell the thing with prayer Whose sightless footsteps pad the floor, Whose fearful trespass mounts the stair Or burts the lock’d forbidden door. Some have seen corpses long interr'd Escape from hallowing control, Pale charnel forms—nay ev’n have heard The shrilling of a troubled soul, That wanders till the dawn hath cross’d The dolorous dark, or Earth hath wound Closer her storm-spredd cloke, and thrust The baleful phantoms underground.

lunatuna fluttering below belly pasiones swooping down deep gathering storms treasuring rainergías pacíficas marítimas, montañescas abotona tu vientre, maja easles b ready to capture flight entre tus aguas claras allow flow …reflect… clama la milpa eye your center cherish thigh hug torso b one with duende within discover sun risa raza roja

No eye that sees could fail to remark you: like any leaf the rain leaves fixed to and flat against the barn’s gray shingle. But what leaf, this time of year, is so pale, the pale of leaves when they’ve lost just enough green to become the green that means loss and more loss, approaching? Give up the flesh enough times, and whatever is lost gets forgotten: that was the thought that I woke to, those words in my head. I rose, I did not dress, I left no particular body sleeping and, stepping into the hour, I saw you, strange sign, at once transparent and impossible to entirely see through. and how still: the still of being unmoved, and then the still of no longer being able to be moved. If I think of a heart, his, as I’ve found it.... If I think of, increasingly, my own.... If I look at you now, as from above, and see the diva when she is caught in mid- triumph, arms half-raised, the body as if set at last free of the green sheath that has— how many nights?—held her, it is not without remembering another I once saw: like you, except that something, a bird, some wild and necessary hunger, had gotten to it; and like the diva, but now broken, splayed and torn, the green torn piecemeal from her. I remember the hands, and—how small they seemed, bringing the small ripped thing to me.

For Scott Harris Last summer’s fishing failures dangled from trees: a Rapala and Jitterbug a stand of privet paid for, half-ounce jigs with rubber skirts and jelly worms with wide-gap hooks on ten-pound test we tithed with overzealous casts at bass. Then off we’d go (our stringers bare) to find a yard to cut, a truck to wash, so we could fill the tackle box we shared again. Today is 12/12/12, the Mayan end, and I, a country boy in Brooklyn for the week, will hail a cab for the first time and think of cows unnerved by fish we missed and shouts of “shit” that followed, and dawns to dusks and always back with you, my childhood friend. Our girls will never know that pond’s deep hole a baseball diamond now fills — the city leaders’ bright idea — or how their fathers sitting in the bleachers on Saturdays a couple decades later can almost feel the stinging nettle against their thighs, the lunker largemouth sweeping the bed with her tail while plastic lizards jerk and drag across the third base line, or how when we untrain our ears to baseballs cracking bats and bitchy parents, called strikes and alike, we hear the peepers sounding off in oaks on down the way, our mothers’ and fathers’ voices calling us home not too far behind or ahead.

What flickers with some delicacy of feeling, some hesitancy— and then persists. • What circles. What darts. • Hunger is like the inside biting you. “Like” is like insomnia. • These green cherry tomatoes; their false pregnancies, staked. Lustrous. • “That’s all I meant.” All I meant by “witches.”