1630 Nature poems

Will haul this gelatinous body, will lash forward this non-form, will push this organism of gas through the gray regions. A sour wind tears through the thin white hair. A wind of vinegar and henbane tears in the rustling, discarded bird-shells that were abandoned empty and fragile when the throbbing bird-boils moved on toward so-called life. Now I see the cunning needle-trees sling these clumps of heavy pouch-flesh back and forth between them: small feather-birds “fly” above my heads. I haul myself, I haul myself, I haul my dragging structure along the river furrow’s muddy, sloppily overlapping slopes. I am so bitter, so wet, so the mouth smears the inside with the sweetness of the chewed-up blood-chisel. Out of this blood I am going to suck my nourishment for some time. I haul, I urge my dissolved substance, slowly forward across the metal of calm stones, the hovering thread-glue’s suction toward a point in the distant middle of the perspective. Where the river’s banks will meet and like the thinnest needle of silver of liquid will drill its dark tunnel-water straight into the heart of the dying image, this moistly broken-up surface of paper to which we cling. I haul I haul I touch myself, touch the skin-rind with chafed-up viscous fingers. Little mermaid from ocean foam molded–I haul my long veils, layers of elastic cartilage, of slippery, shimmering membranes, chlorophyll. The gills shudder and glow deep down in this chasm of tissue–constantly rustling, squeaking, gasping for air. This whirling, howling, desperate lack of oxygen; the scream–if it had had enough oxygen to scream and a mouth with which to scream–the scream to swallow the entire lung full of clear wind. Lizards play, glitter green, blue, and red between the skin membranes of the body dress. Where does this mass end? I search inward through strata to find the core of my plasma wet from juices, to find the core of body-flesh despite the outer, surrounding flesh, the naked body’s stable surface, a kind of human here inside the bluing, plant-becoming. Something to hold on to behind the spread of the sickness of mud, fermentation. But there is nothing to grasp beneath this mantle of slippery webbed skin, burst through by a pounding net of veins. I now lick my tongue against the outer claws of the fingers to tear life into the ions, to make sores bitter in the tongue’s blue ventricles. A kind of pain therefore radiates against the inner glands, a faint spasm of cheers before this, the nervous system’s last chance to communicate with the dying I. The mists smart, shimmer, the lumps of blue cobalt from the mustard gas corrode through the otherwise red shroud-clouds that drag their bellies against the river’s surface. In one of the skin-folds between the pockets of the genital dress, lizards gather in heaps of glimmering scales. But time runs on time and starvation and the weakness carries me in across the gray regions. And the soul’s dark night will slowly be lowered through me. That is why I now slowly fold myself like a muscle against the wet clay to press the flesh against the sleep-gland’s mouths. I will sleep now in my bird body in the down, and a bitter star will radiate eternally above the glowing face’s watercourse.

In a stable of boats I lie still, From all sleeping children hidden. The leap of a fish from its shadow Makes the whole lake instantly tremble. With my foot on the water, I feel The moon outside Take on the utmost of its power. I rise and go out through the boats. I set my broad sole upon silver, On the skin of the sky, on the moonlight, Stepping outward from earth onto water In quest of the miracle This village of children believed That I could perform as I dived For one who had sunk from my sight. I saw his cropped haircut go under. I leapt, and my steep body flashed Once, in the sun. Dark drew all the light from my eyes. Like a man who explores his death By the pull of his slow-moving shoulders, I hung head down in the cold, Wide-eyed, contained, and alone Among the weeds, And my fingertips turned into stone From clutching immovable blackness. Time after time I leapt upward Exploding in breath, and fell back From the change in the children’s faces At my defeat. Beneath them I swam to the boathouse With only my life in my arms To wait for the lake to shine back At the risen moon with such power That my steps on the light of the ripples Might be sustained. Beneath me is nothing but brightness Like the ghost of a snowfield in summer. As I move toward the center of the lake, Which is also the center of the moon, I am thinking of how I may be The savior of one Who has already died in my care. The dark trees fade from around me. The moon’s dust hovers together. I call softly out, and the child’s Voice answers through blinding water. Patiently, slowly, He rises, dilating to break The surface of stone with his forehead. He is one I do not remember Having ever seen in his life. The ground I stand on is trembling Upon his smile. I wash the black mud from my hands. On a light given off by the grave I kneel in the quick of the moon At the heart of a distant forest And hold in my arms a child Of water, water, water.

Another drought morning after a too brief dawn downpour, unaccountable silvery glitterings on the leaves of the withering maples— I think of a troop of the blissful blessed approaching Dante, “a hundred spheres shining,” he rhapsodizes, “the purest pearls…” then of the frightening brilliants myriad gleam in my lamp of the eyes of the vast swarm of bats I found once in a cave, a chamber whose walls seethed with a spaceless carpet of creatures, their cacophonous, keen, insistent, incessant squeakings and squealings churning the warm, rank, cloying air; of how one, perfectly still among all the fitfully twitching others, was looking straight at me, gazing solemnly, thoughtfully up from beneath the intricate furl of its leathery wings as though it couldn’t believe I was there, or were trying to place me, to situate me in the gnarl we’d evolved from, and now, the trees still heartrendingly asparkle, Dante again, this time the way he’ll refer to a figure he meets as “the life of…” not the soul, or person, the life, and once more the bat, and I, our lives in that moment together, our lives, our lives, his with no vision of celestial splendor, no poem, mine with no flight, no unblundering dash through the dark, his without realizing it would, so soon, no longer exist, mine having to know for us both that everything ends, world, after-world, even their memory, steamed away like the film of uncertain vapor of the last of the luscious rain.

Lady, take care; for in the diamond eyes Of old old men is figured your undoing; Love is turned in behind the wrinkled lids To nurse their fear and scorn at their near going. Flesh hangs like the curtains in a house Long unused, damp as cellars without wine; They are the future of us all, when we Will be dried-leaf-thin, the sour whine Of a siren’s diminuendo. They have no past But egg husks shattered to a rubbish heap By memory’s looting. Do not follow them To their camp pitched in a cranny, do not keep To the road for them, a weary weary yard Will bring you in; that beckoning host ahead, Inn-keeper Death, has but to lift his hat To topple the oldster in the dust. Read, Poor old man, the sensual moral; sleep Narrow in your bed, wear no More so bright a rose in your lapel; The spell of the world is loosed, it is time to go.

The white clothes on the line put the man to sleep. He was sitting on a soda case Leaning back on the porch. He rolled down his sleeves with his eyes shut. He could feel the sun going into the trees. He wanted to catch the evening ferry And meet someone across the river. He dreamed about her Putting polish on her nails. He was in the woods and many women Were walking around him in a circle. He thought about crosses in their blood. As it got to be night he could feel the heat in his face. He was going to open his eyes. And look up at the moon. It was like the light blue handkerchief She gave him to go with his dark suit. That’s when he felt the hot salt all over him Like broken glass. He was afraid to open his eyes. He wondered if he could use any words on it. But the big woman in the black dress Was already in the backseat of the car Rolling the window up with one hand And making a sign on him with the other. She was in the car, too. He saw her biting her nails when they pulled away. There was a dead snake on his shoes. He knew there would be a circle Of little beating hearts in his bed, And before he could get home They would be dry and still.

Tonight, away begins to go farther away, and the dream what do we know of the dream metallic leaps Jackson Pollock silvery streams Jackson Pollock I gaze across the sea see in the distance your walk and you pass the Pacific, distant and blue phallus and Moloch pace my view on into otherness on into otherness? are we in the world after or before are we or are we not magnetic force it is apparently me you inform: genesis woman dream that begins tonight to go farther away tonight to reach farther away metallic leaps Jackson Pollock silvery streams Jackson Pollock on across the blue sea

on the ground can spook a horse who won’t flinch when faced with a backhoe or a pack of Harleys. I call it “horse ophthalmology,” because it is a different kind of system— not celestial, necessarily, but vision in which the small, the wispy, the lightly lifted or stirring threads of existence excite more fear than louder and larger bodies do. It’s Matthew who said that the light of the body is the eye, and that if the eye is healthy the whole body will be full of light. Maybe in this case “light” can also mean “lightness.” With my eyes of corrupted and corruptible flesh I’m afraid I see mostly darkness by which I mean heaviness. How great is that darkness? Not as great as the inner weightlessness of horses whose eyes perceive, correctly I believe, the threat of annihilation in every windblown dust mote of malignant life. All these years I’ve been watching out warily in obvious places (in bars, in wars, in night cities and nightmares, on furious seas). Yet what’s been trying to destroy me has lain hidden inside friendly-seeming breezes, behind soft music, beneath the carpet of small things one can barely see. The eye is also a lamp, says Matthew, a giver of light, bestower of incandescent honey, which I will pour more cautiously over the courses I travel from now on. What’s that whisper? Just the delicate sweeping away of somebody’s life.

1 A tree, enamel needles, owl takeoffs shake, flapping a sound and smell of underwing, like flags, the clothy weight of flags. A cone of silence stuck with diamonds, the watch she hunts, the frayed band broke. It was a black night. Dawn walked on it, the sun set its heel. She won’t find: a boundary of marsh, the island in the wood.

The night is come, but not too soon; And sinking silently, All silently, the little moon Drops down behind the sky. There is no light in earth or heaven But the cold light of stars; And the first watch of night is given To the red planet Mars. Is it the tender star of love? The star of love and dreams? O no! from that blue tent above, A hero's armor gleams. And earnest thoughts within me rise, When I behold afar, Suspended in the evening skies, The shield of that red star. O star of strength! I see thee stand And smile upon my pain; Thou beckonest with thy mailèd hand, And I am strong again. Within my breast there is no light But the cold light of stars; I give the first watch of the night To the red planet Mars. The star of the unconquered will, He rises in my breast, Serene, and resolute, and still, And calm, and self-possessed. And thou, too, whosoe'er thou art, That readest this brief psalm, As one by one thy hopes depart, Be resolute and calm. O fear not in a world like this, And thou shalt know erelong, Know how sublime a thing it is To suffer and be strong.

It’s a beautiful world, you said, with these trees, marshes, deserts, grasses, rivers and seas and so on. And the moon is really something in its circuits of relative radiance. Include the wingèd M, voluptuous Venus, hotheaded Mars, that lucky devil J and cranky Saturn, of course, plus U and N and the wanderer P, in short the whole solar family, complete with its Milky Way, and count up all the other systems with dots and spots and in that endless emptiness what you’ve got is a commotion of you-know-what. It’s a beautiful universe, you said, just take a good look through the desert’s dark glasses for instance or on your back in seas of grass, take a good look at the deluge of that Rorschach—we’re standing out there somewhere, together.