1630 Nature poems

Four white heifers with sprawling hooves trundle the waggon. Its ill-roped crates heavy with fruit sway. The chisel point of the goad, blue and white, glitters ahead, a flame to follow lance-high in a man’s hand who does not shave. His linen trousers like him want washing. You can see his baked skin through his shirt. He has no shoes and his hat has a hole in it. ‘Hu ! vaca ! Hu ! vaca !’ he says staccato without raising his voice; ‘Adios caballero’ legato but in the same tone. Camelmen high on muzzled mounts boots rattling against the panels of an empty packsaddle do not answer strangers. Each with his train of seven or eight tied head to tail they pass silent but for the heavy bells and plip of slobber dripping from muzzle to dust; save that on sand their soles squeak slightly. Milkmaids, friendly girls between fourteen and twenty or younger, bolt upright on small trotting donkeys that bray (they arch their tails a few inches from the root, stretch neck and jaw forward to make the windpipe a trumpet) chatter. Jolted cans clatter. The girls’ smiles repeat the black silk curve of the wimple under the chin. Their hats are absurd doll’s hats or flat-crowned to take a load. All have fine eyes. You can guess their balanced nakedness under the cotton gown and thin shift. They sing and laugh. They say ‘Adios!’ shyly but look back more than once, knowing our thoughts and sharing our desires and lack of faith in desire.

Home; a place to rest your feet, a place where you can sleep. Man, a place where you can shit, and no one can complain. My Home /el barrio where people rest their feet outside on the fire escapes, where i have a place to sleep with my brothers, sisters, cousins oh yes, and Rover all in the same bed. / where no can smell shit 'cause we've been living in it all our lives (we're immune to its stink) My home; where on hot summer days people gather on the grandstands / the fire escapes and in the box seats/ the stoops and cheer our home gang's stickball team (they call themselves "the new york junkies"). and on those cool summer evenings we hang our legs from the windows / the roofs /      the fire escapes while eating pop corn and sippin coke / or snorting it   / shooting it and watch the Saturday evening gang-fights. yes, this is home /      our paradises and you're always welcomed as long as you're poor. and it was here       / in my home that a butterfly happened to wing by he was easily spotted as a UFO because of all his beautiful colors he flew over the buildings / through the lots / around home plate      a sewer top in the middle of the street he flew in his dance about manner. and i almost cried when i saw children reaching reaching out for him      reaching for hope for love / for that lost dream and he continued dancing /     or maybe flying away away to save his beauty from these love-hungry children he flew        he flew and i cried when he fell down the sewer / now he was part of us.

On a branch floating downriver a cricket, singing.

— 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?