1630 Nature poems

— Candy’s Stop, up Hwy. 52 I been ‘Candy’ since I came here young. My born name keeps but I don’t say. To her who my mama was I was pure millstone, cumbrance.Child ain’t but a towsack full of bane. Well I lit out right quick. Hitched, and so forth.   Legged it. Was rid. Accabee at first (then, thicket-hid) then Wadmalaw; out to Nash’s meat-yard, Obie’s jook.   At County Home they had this jazzhorn drumbeat orphan-band ‘ them lambs ’ they — They let me bide and listen. This gristly man he came he buttered me then took me off (swore I was surely something) let me ride in back. Some thing— (snared) (spat-on) Thing being morelike moresoever what he meant. No I’d never sound what brunts he called me what he done had I a hundred mouths. How his mouth.   Repeats on me down the years.   Everlastingly riveled-looking, like rotfruit.   Wasn’t it runched up like a grub. First chance I inched off (back through bindweed) I was gone. Nothing wrong with gone as a place for living.   Whereby a spore eats air when she has to; where I’ve fairly much clung for peace. Came the day I came here young I mothed my self.   I cleaved apart. A soul can hide like moth on bark. My born name keeps but I don’t say.

Luxurious man, to bring his vice in use, Did after him the world seduce; And from the fields the flow’rs and plants allure, Where nature was most plain and pure. He first enclos’d within the garden’s square A dead and standing pool of air; And a more luscious earth for them did knead, Which stupefied them while it fed. The pink grew then as double as his mind; The nutriment did change the kind. With strange perfumes he did the roses taint, And flow’rs themselves were taught to paint. The tulip, white, did for complexion seek, And learn’d to interline its cheek; Its onion root they then so high did hold, That one was for a meadow sold. Another world was search’d, through oceans new, To find the Marvel of Peru. And yet these rarities might be allow’d, To man, that sov’reign thing and proud; Had he not dealt between the bark and tree, Forbidden mixtures there to see. No plant now knew the stock from which it came, He grafts upon the wild the tame; That the uncertain and adult’rate fruit Might put the palate in dispute. His green seraglio has its eunuchs too, Lest any tyrant him out-do; And in the cherry he does nature vex, To procreate without a sex. ’Tis all enforc’d, the fountain and the grot, While the sweet fields do lie forgot; Where willing nature does to all dispense A wild and fragrant innocence; And fauns and fairies do the meadows till, More by their presence than their skill. Their statues polish’d by some ancient hand, May to adorn the gardens stand; But howso’ere the figures do excel, The gods themselves with us do dwell.

Ye living lamps, by whose dear light The nightingale does sit so late, And studying all the summer night, Her matchless songs does meditate; Ye country comets, that portend No war nor prince’s funeral, Shining unto no higher end Than to presage the grass’s fall; Ye glow-worms, whose officious flame To wand’ring mowers shows the way, That in the night have lost their aim, And after foolish fires do stray; Your courteous lights in vain you waste, Since Juliana here is come, For she my mind hath so displac’d That I shall never find my home.

When they told us Don’t speak until spoken to, we grew ears the size of corn. When they forced us to eat everything we swallowed their hurt whole. When they hit us for drawing on the wall we painted doors that opened behind curtains. For generations they lived like this. Wanting badly to save us—not knowing how. & all the while we found love in unlikely places: In the ravaged church of our bodies & our faces, refracted in their long faces.

My mind hovered over my baby, like a raptor, and froze everything it saw. I looked through my own pregnant belly's raw perimeters and found his heart to strike attentive until, helpless with the pound of still more blood, he seemed to settle down. It was my loss to feel like god alone for a new one always listening, to reach inside for his ears to share the flying speech I heard so constantly. Within my grown silence, my sounding, my loud body where the baby turned, my mind learned not to care whether thoughts I felt he noticed with no fear were mine alone—or whether he could hear.

If you press a stone with your finger, Sir Isaac Newton observed, The finger is also Pressed by the stone. But can a woman, pressed by memory’s finger, In the deep night, alone, Of her softness move The airy thing That presses upon her With the whole weight of love? This Sir Isaac said nothing of.

I Driving westward near Niagara, that transfiguring of the waters, I was torn—as moon from orbit by a warping of gravitation— From coercion of the freeway to the cataract’s prodigality, Had to stand there, breathe its rapture, inebriety of the precipice . . . Fingers clamped to iron railings in a tremor of earth’s vibration, I look upstream: foam and boulders wail with a biblical desolation, Tree roots, broken oar, a pier end, wrack of the continent dissolving . . . Braced, like tunnel workers hunching from implosion of locomotives, I look down: to ancient chaos, scrawl of the fog for commentary, Misty scripture—Delphic, Jungian—all mythology in gestation, Mists that chill our face in passing, soar to a mushroom luminescence . . . In between, where halos dazzle—as, on a high wire, spangled dancers— On the brink those waters sluice to, in the devil-may-care insouciance Of their roistering to glory, no forewarning of what impends, till Solid earth dissolves beneath them; all they had banked on once, vacuity . . . Kindled in the hollow wind they flare to a greenish incandescence; Channels they defined so smartly in the gusto of their careening All behind them now; before them, blinding haze and the noon’s diffusion . . . II Ten feet over those, our railing perched on a spur where verge and void—there!— Hiss and arc to touch each other, matter and shadow-matter fuming, We stare through the flow to bedrock, flashing its Kodachrome geology. Images swirl by—real, fancied—bits of hallucinated litter: Gold of oak leaf, taffy wrapper, lavender airmail—assignation? Yellow Kodak pack, pied comics, tissue a crimson lip had stippled (Let’s imagine). Some shows vivid, fresh-shellacked in the river’s sepia, All no sooner seen than vanished—on to the brink, its foaming rotos Hoarse as all earth’s turbines turning in a thunder of synchronicity. How deep toward the edge? waist? shoulder? as through a woozy lens we scan its Floor, old temple tesselation— No, terrain of the moon! Medusa’s Ancient face, and we stare frozen: stony glare in its vipers’ tangle . . . Still a thought returns and troubles: “no forewarning of what impends, till—” Shadow of impends—more menace coiled in the word than fact itself has: Fact erodes in action: Athens, in the arroyos of her theater, Leaned to watch the self-destructing of her blinded grandiosities, Willfulness and Will, a crash course; then, too late for it, anagnorisis; Purged of trivia through immersion in the clotted baths of tragedy, Then she knew and was transfigured by contrarious exaltations . . . III Eyes can’t leave the livid seething, its reiterative Memento! Reading, in this bubble chamber, stuff of the world as effervescence, Reading every life as half-life, reading in foam the one prognosis . . . Mac the trucker—checkered mackinaw, sort of a baseball cap with earflaps, Fists to crinkle up his beer cans—here at the falls is philosophical: “Down the tube. That’s life”—he’s waggish, nudging his cozy blonde—“You know, hon?” And she knows. We all know: Nature, making a splendor of our banalities, Lavishes Niagara on us, nudging our knack for the anagogical . . . Meanwhile, earth itself rolls over, nations caught in its tug of traction, From the brink of noon to darkness (but the grandeur of the transition!) Gone, like taffy wrapper, tissue: ferny world of the stegosaurus, Heraclitus, toe in rivers, Coriolanus in Corioli, Dancing T’ang girl, belles of Bali, kings of France with the Roman numerals, Gone, the fripperies and follies glossed in an Architectural Digest, Halls of mortuary marble, dinky glitz of the rare objet, the Aubusson, netsuke, scrimshaw, Tiffany, Tanagra, Bohara, All things au courant, things current—what a word with the gorge before us!— All our bookshelves, facts in folio, paleontology, agronomy, Jewels from that cluttered dump, statistics— many a scuffed Aladdin’s lamp there: As: one cell’s genetic lore’d fill seventy-five Manhattan phone books; As: for each poor soul among us, many a galaxy out there somewhere, Each of us more precious—rarer!—than a glittering island universe . . . We could catalogue forever; there’s no end to the world’s diversity, All that affluence from somewhere, more than a continent behind it; There’s no diminution either from the torrential cornucopia Since that primal burst of fireworks, first explosion from singularity; All the things, their scree, diluvium—go to the malls for confirmation: Lurid brass shop, teak shop, tech shop, patio ’n’ pool shop, campy duds shop . . . IV Most we’re through with soon enough, but some! how they lacerate the heart—not Savage indignation’s gash—but thrilling, with finer blade, pain’s inmost Nerve: the unsigned card I love you kept in a bureau drawer for decades; Sweater she wore once, that autumn, rich with the campfire musk; then letters, Lavish o, impulsive flourish, “When you’re away, in other cities, It’s their weather reports I look for, first thing in the morning papers . . .” So once the Provençal poet, in his rapture about freid’aura: “Winter winds that blow from your land feel like heaven upon my cheek here . . .” They’ve gone too, Provence and poet, off in the jumble-carts of history, Who was she? that rueful beauty, jewel of the court and joy of kings, who Dying murmured, “Je me regrette!”—wistful dear, with her curls disheveled On that last of all her pillows, feeling the dark impend—“I’ll miss me!” Images swirl by: châteaux that dance in the pool’s hallucination, Fêtes and follies effervescing—champagne, glass, and the hand that held them— Last, herself, the self where soul is, world of her lavalieres and lovers. Did she dream, through mists arising, how on the high wire, floodlit dancer, She had lived her brilliant moment? Hear, as the blood ran hushed, sonorous Thunders of the living river, more than a continent its source? And Not divine—so near the brink where verve like hers and the void meet, seething— Wreathed in opulence of sunset, some transfiguring of the waters?

In May’s gaud gown and ruby reckoning the old saw wind repeats a colder thing. Says, you are the bluest body I ever seen. Says, dance that skeletal startle the way I might. Radius, ulna, a catalogue of flex. What do you think you’re grabbing with those gray hands? What do you think you’re hunting, cat-mouth creeling in the mouseless dawn? Pink as meat in the butcher’s tender grip, white as the opal of a thigh you smut the lie on. In May’s red ruse and smattered ravishings you one, you two, you three your cruder schemes, you blanch black lurk and blood the pallid bone and hum scald need where the body says I am and the rose sighs Touch me, I am dying in the pleatpetal purring of mouthweathered May.

In the backyard of our house on Norwood, there were five hundred steel cages lined up, each with a wooden box roofed with tar paper; inside, two stories, with straw for a bed. Sometimes the minks would pace back and forth wildly, looking for a way out; or else they’d hide in their wooden houses, even when we’d put the offering of raw horse meat on their trays, as if they knew they were beautiful and wanted to deprive us. In spring the placid kits drank with glazed eyes. Sometimes the mothers would go mad and snap their necks. My uncle would lift the roof like a god who might lift our roof, look down on us and take us out to safety. Sometimes one would escape. He would go down on his hands and knees, aiming a flashlight like a bullet of light, hoping to catch the orange gold of its eyes. He wore huge boots, gloves so thick their little teeth couldn’t bite through. “They’re wild,” he’d say. “Never trust them.” Each afternoon when I put the scoop of raw meat rich with eggs and vitamins on their trays, I’d call to each a greeting. Their small thin faces would follow as if slightly curious. In fall they went out in a van, returning sorted, matched, their skins hanging down on huge metal hangers, pinned by their mouths. My uncle would take them out when company came and drape them over his arm—the sweetest cargo. He’d blow down the pelts softly and the hairs would part for his breath and show the shining underlife which, like the shining of the soul, gives us each character and beauty.

This is the light of the mind, cold and planetary. The trees of the mind are black. Their irregular branches, like broken arms backlit from MRI dye, offset by yearning. They take form in ways only experts can decipher. The light is blue. The observation of the alien doctor flickers in his iris, furnace gaslight burning like a pagan memorial. The grasses unload their griefs on my feet as if I were God, I pity their need for idolatry. It bares itself only to the void of me, Prickling my ankles and murmuring of their humility. I am unable to convince them otherwise. I hear them mew and compete as if for a rough teat's clear nutrition. Foolish rule of the organic, uncultured and out of control. I am mum and tidy as a nun in comparison. Though capable of devastation are my desires which punish the landscape with recrimination, uprooting the hedges. They swallow fire, speak in four languages, and love no one. I shudder with pride as they push themselves back to their origin, to the scraped-out bottom of a uterine nothing; this hard loneliness, skull-solid, pushed back into vagueness until it succumbs as if overwhelmed by barbiturates. Fumy, spiritous mists inhabit this place Separated from my house by a row of headstones. Its green vapors trigger an olfactory déjà vu like a recurrent nightmare. I envy the buried faces finally freed from worry and ailment, from the pressure to remain always forward-thinking. I picture their release, the prostrate bodies floating up as if levitated. What peace, what stillness was shoveled onto their pine box beds where darkness then dropped, all at once, final as an execution. I simply cannot see where there is to get to. The moon is no door. It is a face in its own right, White as a knuckle and terribly upset. I identify with its nausea. It meets me in the mirror uninvited, this face beneath my face, restless and unwilling. It formulates inside me like a kicking fetus and refuses to be ignored. It haunts and threatens like a past trauma. It drags the sea after it like a dark crime; mute as a mug shot, it is quiet, like someone suffocated who suddenly stops struggling. I recognize in its warm death the expression of the starving With the O-gape of complete despair. I live here. Against me a force, not stronger or more intelligent, but more adaptable to poor weather like dandelions. I can feel it whittle me down to horse feed pellets. I'm being winnowed out of the earth's circulation, with a pairing incremental as this winter's passing. Twice on Sunday the bells startle the sky— Eight great tongues affirming the Resurrection. I'm forced to listen to the liturgical lecturing, truant student of a catechism I loathe. At the end, they soberly bong out their names; Myths and ideals I could never bring myself to believe in, my prayers, the self-flagellation of unrequited love. The yew tree points up like a New England steeple. It has a Gothic shape. It used to remind me of home. The eyes lift after it and find the moon. Once fragile as rice paper, it hangs static and tough like a noose signifying more hardship ahead— interrogating flashlight that hurts my eyes. Now no home exists—just an empty bed, a pile of mangled sheets atop a dark wood floor, like snow atop the frozen mud tracks of hoof and wheel. The moon is my mother.She is not sweet like Mary. She licks her white feathers and stares back with one eye vicious as a swan about to bite. Her blue garments unloose small bats and owls. I watch, my leg caught in the truth of my life where beyond human emotion I've traveled at this point. How I would like to believe in tenderness— in those symbolic unions that elicit sweet concepts: mother and child, father and daughter, husband and wife. The face of the effigy, gentled by candles, its cheekbones flushed with an afterworld favoritism Bending, on me in particular, its mild eyes; hair waving, mouth parted in mid-speech like drowned Ophelia. I have fallen a long way. I lie at the bottom, smashed like a dinner plate against kitchen tile, china chips and jagged bits. I lie at the bottom, shattered and dangerous, looking up with a baby's stunned engrossment. I'm moving closer to Pluto and Mars. Clouds are flowering blue and mystical over the face of the stars,— It will not be quick. Death drinks me in, slow as syrup. Inside the church, the saints will be all blue. They've ascended into heaven's oxygen-deprived morgue. Floating on their delicate feet over the cold pews, Their hands and faces stiff with holiness, mannequins perennially enacting the nativity in a wax museum. The moon sees nothing of this. She is bald and wild as one dying of cancer. She begs for relief, but her pillow-muffled shrieks disperse with the other sounds and shadows of the night. We are left alone, her cadaver face, gaunt and grim, prescient of mine. And the message of the yew tree is blackness—blackness and silence. Sylvia Plath, "The Moon and the Yew Tree," Ariel (New York: Harper & Row, 1961)