1630 Nature poems

Over my head, I see the bronze butterfly, Asleep on the black trunk, Blowing like a leaf in green shadow. Down the ravine behind the empty house, The cowbells follow one another Into the distances of the afternoon. To my right, In a field of sunlight between two pines, The droppings of last year’s horses Blaze up into golden stones. I lean back, as the evening darkens and comes on. A chicken hawk floats over, looking for home. I have wasted my life.

Alone I list In the leafy tryst; Silent the woodlands in their starry sleep— Silent the phantom wood in waters deep: No footfall of a wind along the pass Startles a harebell—stirs a blade of grass. Yonder the wandering weeds, Enchanted in the light, Stand in the gusty hollows, still and white; Yonder are plumy reeds, Dusking the border of the clear lagoon; Far off the silver clifts Hang in ethereal light below the moon; Far off the ocean lifts, Tossing its billows in the misty beam, And shore-lines whiten, silent as a dream: I hark for the bird, and all the hushed hills harken: This is the valley: here the branches darken The silver-lighted stream. Hark— That rapture in the leafy dark! Who is it shouts upon the bough aswing, Waking the upland and the valley under? What carols, like the blazon of a king, Fill all the dawn with wonder? Oh, hush, It is the thrush, In the deep and woody glen! Ah, thus the gladness of the gods was sung, When the old Earth was young; That rapture rang, When the first morning on the mountains sprang: And now he shouts, and the world is young again! Carol, my king, On your bough aswing! Thou art not of these evil days— Thou art a voice of the world’s lost youth: Oh, tell me what is duty—what is truth— How to find God upon these hungry ways; Tell of the golden prime, When bird and beast could make a man their friend ; When men beheld swift deities descend, Before the race was left alone with Time, Homesick on Earth, and homeless to the end; Before great Pan was dead, Before the naiads fled; When maidens white with dark eyes shy and bold, With peals of laughter on the peaks of gold, Startled the still dawn— Shone in upon the mountains and were gone, Their voices fading silverly in depths of forests old. Sing of the wonders of their woodland ways, Before the weird earth-hunger of these days, When there was rippling mirth, When justice was on Earth, And light and grandeur of the Golden Age; When never a heart was sad, When all from king to herdsman had A penny for a wage. Ah, that old time has faded to a dream— The moon’s fair face is broken in the stream; Yet shout and carol on, O bird, and let The exiled race not utterly forget; Publish thy revelation on the lawns— Sing ever in the dark ethereal dawns; Sometime, in some sweet year, These stormy souls, these men of Earth may hear. But hark again, From the secret glen, That voice of rapture and ethereal youth Now laden with despair. Forbear, O bird, forbear: Is life not terrible enough forsooth? Cease, cease the mystic song— No more, no more, the passion and the pain: It wakes my life to fret against the chain; It makes me think of all the agéd wrong— Of joy and the end of joy and the end of all— Of souls on Earth, and souls beyond recall. Ah, ah, that voice again! It makes me think of all these restless men Called into time—their progress and their goal; And now, oh now, it sends into my soul Dreams of a love that might have been for me— That might have been—and now can never be. Tell me no more of these— Tell me of trancéd trees; (The ghosts, the memories, in pity spare) Show me the leafy home of the wild bees; Show me the snowy summits dim in air; Tell me of things afar In valleys silent under moon and star: Dim hollows hushed with night, The lofty cedars misty in the light, Wild clusters of the vine, Wild odors of the pine, The eagle’s eyrie lifted to the moon— High places where on quiet afternoon A shadow swiftens by, a thrilling scream Startles the cliff, and dies across the woodland to a dream. Ha, now He springs from the bough, It flickers—he is lost! Out of the copse he sprang; This is the floating briar where he tossed: The leaves are yet atremble where he sang Here a long vista opens—look! This is the way he took, Through the pale poplars by the pond: Hark! he is shouting in the field beyond. Ho, there he goes Through the alder close! He leaves me here behind him in his flight, And yet my heart goes with him out of sight! What whispered spell Of Faëry calls me on from dell to dell? I hear the voice—it wanders in a dream— Now in the grove, now on the hill, now on the fading stream. Lead on—you know the way Lead on to Arcady, O’er fields asleep; by river bank abrim; Down leafy ways, dewy and cool and dim; By dripping rocks, dark dwellings of the gnome, Where hurrying waters dash their crests to foam. I follow where you lead, Down winding paths, across the flowery mead, Down silent hollows where the woodbine blows, Up water-courses scented by the rose. I follow the wandering voice— I follow, I rejoice, I fade away into the Age of Gold— We two together lost in forest old.- O ferny and thymy paths, 0 fields of Aidenn, Canyons and cliffs by mortal feet untrod! O souls that are weary and are heavy laden, Here is the peace of God ! Lo! now the clamoring hours are on the way: Faintly the pine tops redden in the ray; From vale to vale fleet-footed rumors run, With sudden apprehension of the sun; A light wind stirs The filmy tops of delicate dim firs, And on the river border blows, Breaking the shy bud softly to a rose. Sing out, O throstle, sing: I follow on, my king: Lead me forever through the crimson dawn— Till the world ends, lead me on! Ho there! he shouts again—he sways—and now, Upspringing from the bough, Flashing a glint of dew upon the ground, Without a sound He drops into a valley and is gone!

Night’s afterbirth, last dream before waking, Holding on with dissolving hands, Out of it came, not a line of old men, But pairs of headlights, delaying morning. It felt like tears, like wetted bedsheets, And suspended in it like a medicine In vapor was the ocean’s presence, ghost Of deep water and the bite of salt. Here you found your body again, The hand before your face and the face it touched, Eyes floating, feet on invisible ground, Vagueness like another skin. Sent out into it anyway, because it was morning, To taste it, touch blind hardness Like marble ruins, and skirt the edges, Razors in goosedown, hydrants’ fists. Abruptly out of it waves appeared, Transmuted from hanging silver ore, crafted Before the eyes into curving metals That broke into soup scum, Queen Anne’s lace. Out of a great nothing, a theology. Out of the amorphous, an edgeless body Or one like a hunting mass of tendrils That hurried down the sand, moved by hunger. I remember a gang of friends Racing a fog bank’s onslaught along the beach. Seal-slick, warm from the sun This thing would eat, they ran laughing. The fog came on. And they were beautiful, The three boys and one girl, still in her wetsuit, And the dissolution overtaking them, Their stridency, full of faith, still audible. All morning bathed in a dovelike brooding. The fog satisfied itself by overwhelming The meagre dew, watering the doors 0f snails, the leeward mold, and held still. And then near noon there was a concentration As if the sky tried to find a slippery word Or remember—that’s right—remember Where it was in an unfamiliar bedroom. And knew. And switched the light on. Wide awake.

Ripeness was a semitone below the bone clef of the elbow keying the rain-slicked cyclone fence: the firm, saclike rind of a warped minim, golden drupe note for which we longed. Stone fruit are fine tutors. This one unseals a sensual nose hit. At dusk they go lambent like chunks of bent gloam. Sucked, their fibrous pith is birth-pouf — punk oblong pits belonging in a goblin’s pot, infused with rich static and the fresh electric scratchiti of summer lightning. It’s fortune gave us this softer unit, surely. Edgewise the frangipani made a rain-gap fin for heads rife with fire in the shade of the mango belt.

When I found your face on a pillow of leaves you had already erased it. A nest so heavy can stay in the heavens only by reversal. By this law the knees are laced with abandon. I said to the young man. If watching is the manufacturer, and I lose you what angel takes the place of a dowry or distance in this leaf action? Subject to like passions as we are my soul herself, myself a possession I could not mistake for the man (his language and Latin) yet we are “taken to” a love passage I had hardly noticed in the late talk of money The work of love and the work of art has no sleeping part Is a drop of light in a small silver socket, a rosy dime in a daylight tryst Is a keeper and no spender As seeing who is invisible: a kind of flaxen thing caught in stone I obeyed and read further “I am hemmed” Though my heart were a pear tree threaded with fire Lion you leapt through me like fineness in the boundary gene Conductor you knit me as isthmus     Can I touch it Night is going 200 miles an hr as usual     In this way we find we are suddenly altered If I were a day would you like me better     Where were you you who in a bath changed me How to be walking is a glorious porthole Must I insist on an absence more foolish and secret When your timber’s a forest I can’t see for the tree in my bed Gentle captive, it is a larger than murder we tender     Fond and afire my style and my anchor Master there’s a boat for no lesser completion than beauty’s sweetest dress when you look on me kind Who am I to stop this flowing Least of all that home mile Sinking in the real I dreamed there was a further island Perhaps (how I thought you) to salt that harness with pleasure Lovely hero where the lovely hero bounds an acre hidden between eros and its errors Finding a dozen darts beneath the skin of Watching the wire of a skinny flame No other lovely hero found the back behind her secret form of symmetry Her gleaming difference Her schoolish way in pretty understandings Said   Not done   Not said   Undone Wealthy sadness has a way of winning everyone This is the end of my body as you know it its superfluous penchant for love its poorer costume, its shiny disaster What is a maiden, boatswain, but a fiery lair and a teary citadel By the smallest shipwreck a daughter is laughter Yet equaled as in a fable this Gibraltar goes headlong in a just king’s love See how his hands are her mercy and measure her number and rescue O Perseus Pythagoras Pierre my Pierre What rules a body’s buried factions when laundered by morning When called by our names although we are invisible Sleeping I forget my animal When the animal comes I’m forgotten because of it How was it called in its own country crossing a street in order to come inside

In their proverbs, the Sumerians quoted Fox as saying — on having pissed into the sea —All the ocean is now my urine! Now, hang on there girl. I want to get a handle on your homeopathic incontinent ways, because I think you may be onto something. Firstly, what kind of fox are you that approaches the shore; no hen house to bother, no brambles to scoff? No line of emerald shit to booby-trap the garden with? Perhaps wherever we are, you are; so why not the beach? What promise did the salt ocean offer you, or appear to? Cured meat? Fish? After all, once a month I know I reek gloriously of kelp — salt and iron and yeast — an umami feast for the brave, or weak. Or were you worrying seabirds up on the cliff — stopped in your tracks, unable to resist. A little splish. The wind threshing your water as it fell — yellow, scattered, one or two drops of which maybe reached. Or perhaps you were caught short, coy on the beach, and entered the surf for decorum’s sake. All over the world, miles from the sea, girls caught between poor sanitary provision and a social imperative to be discreet find themselves in a dark place, their skirts about their waists. Maybe it was the king’s men that saw fit to drive you into the sea. But clever, resourceful, you just thumbed your nose and learned to swim. Paddled to safer land, much like we once did. Your charcoal paws doggedly turning the cold pages of the sea. Pausing now and then to pee, a comforting cloud of heat. And which child among us hasn’t cast their blessing on the waves? Sent into the surf  by mothers, which of us hasn’t rightfully claimed the ocean as our own, or in turn been claimed?

I envied the dog lying in the yard so I did it. But there was a pebble under my flank so I got up and looked for the pebble, brushed it away and lay back down. My dog thus far overlooked the pebble. I guess it's her thick Lab fur. With my head downhill the blood gorged me with ideas. Not good. Got up. Turned around. Now I see hundreds of infinitesimal ants. I'm on an ant home. I get up and move five feet. The dog hasn't moved from her serene place. Now I'm rather too near a thicket where I saw a big black snake last week that might decide to join me. I moved near the actual dog this time but she got up and went under the porch. She doesn't like it when I'm acting weird. I'm failing as a dog when my own kind rejects me, but doing better than when I envied birds, the creature the least like us, therefore utterly enviable. To be sure I cheeped a lot but didn't try to fly. We humans can take off but are no good at landing.

The man moves earth to dispel grief. He digs holes the size of cars. In proportion to what is taken what is given multiplies— rain-swollen ponds and dirt mounds rooted with flame-tipped flowers. He carries trees like children struggling to be set down. Trees that have lived out their lives, he cuts and stacks like loaves of bread which he will feed the fire. The green smoke sweetens his house. The woman sweeps air to banish sadness. She dusts floors, polishes objects made of clay and wood. In proportion to what is taken what is given multiplies— the task of something else to clean. Gleaming appliances beg to be smudged, breathed upon by small children and large animals flicking out hope as she whirls by, flap of tongue, scratch of paw, sweetly reminding her. The man moves earth, the woman sweeps air. Together they pull water out of the other, pull with the muscular ache of the living, hauling from the deep well of the body the rain-swollen, the flame-tipped, the milk-fed— all that cycles through lives moving, lives sweeping, water circulating between them like breath, drawn out of leaves by light.

The man moves earth to dispel grief. He digs holes the size of cars. In proportion to what is taken what is given multiplies— rain-swollen ponds and dirt mounds rooted with flame-tipped flowers. He carries trees like children struggling to be set down. Trees that have lived out their lives, he cuts and stacks like loaves of bread which he will feed the fire. The green smoke sweetens his house. The woman sweeps air to banish sadness. She dusts floors, polishes objects made of clay and wood. In proportion to what is taken what is given multiplies— the task of something else to clean. Gleaming appliances beg to be smudged, breathed upon by small children and large animals flicking out hope as she whirls by, flap of tongue, scratch of paw, sweetly reminding her. The man moves earth, the woman sweeps air. Together they pull water out of the other, pull with the muscular ache of the living, hauling from the deep well of the body the rain-swollen, the flame-tipped, the milk-fed— all that cycles through lives moving, lives sweeping, water circulating between them like breath, drawn out of leaves by light.

The man splitting wood in the daybreak looks strong, as though, if one weakened, one could turn to him and he would help. Gus Newland was strong. When he split wood he struck hard, flashing the bright steel through the air so hard the hard maple leapt apart, as it’s feared marriages will do in countries reluctant to permit divorce, and even willow, which, though stacked to dry a full year, on being split actually weeps—totem wood, therefore, to the married-until-death—sunders with many little lip-wetting gasp-noises. But Gus is dead. We could turn to our fathers, but they help us only by the unperplexed looking-back of the numerals cut into headstones. Or to our mothers, whose love, so devastated, can’t, even in spring, break through the hard earth. Our spouses weaken at the same rate we do. We have to hold our children up to lean on them. Everyone who could help goes or hasn’t arrived. What about the man splitting wood in the daybreak, who looked strong? That was years ago. That was me.