1630 Nature poems

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.

The fat girl next door would give us a nickel to walk to the old man's store and get her an ice-cream cone, vanilla, of course, the only flavor then. On Powotan Avenue, Aunt Harriet and I would take turns licking it all the way back. It was hot that summer and we longed to go to Virginia Beach and put our toes in the tide. It rained every day and the James River swelled up to our doorsteps. Aunt Harriet and I wore tight rubber bathing caps and long saggy bathing suits. How skinny we were. She was nine and I was six. The lightning flashed and we hid in the closet; the thunder crashed. We had straight, bobbed hair and bangs. Once a dirigible moved above the tops of the trees, with little ladders dangling down, and we waved.

L ike a cloud above a ravine is the hell you already know: That sublime work of the imagination by Dante Alighieri. But the rain that falls from that cloud is not made up of human souls. It rains, and the rain funnels down into the something-other-than-human sewer. Look how a Chinese writing brush ends in a cone of rigid horsehair. Loaded with ink, the cone will flex, will leave a wet trench in the rice paper. It will leave an attractive trench, and the daylight sucked into the ink Will give it a reflective “shine dot” — like looking into an animal’s eye. Which of you has looked into the looking-up eyes of a hair-trigger fox? A backyard fox or a campsite coyote: Daoist, unintelligible, brave  . . . Which of you knows how not to part the pebble on the beach from its colors? The songbird from its social network? the fruit from its multifaceted peel? Oh, that sugary piece of phosphorus in its form-fitted velvet casing! That unappreciated Egyptian sarcophagus meant | to be opened from the inside. And each seed-bearing fruit has an atmosphere. Each has its several moons, Has tides (subject to gravity), changing weather, lunar eclipses . . . But should an arrow suddenly snatch the waiting pomegranate out of your hand, If it snatches the cap off your head, recall: its circuit has only begun . . . For the arrow of the luckless archer returns to the middle of his or her back. There, between athletic shoulder blades, is a diploma tube full of arrows. Is a diploma tube full of arrows, and so | it is time for graduation. The genie’s gone back to his bottle; the devils to their fallow hells. And the C hinese writing brush , and the cloud above the ravine (wherein The charged particles have sorted themselves along their up-and-down axis), And the looking-up eyes of the fox, and the sarcophagus, and the campsite Are irreducible to a system, are each of them floating over a void. Truly: “All hells and hierarchies are works of the imagination.” And equally: “It is not the part of the Daoist sage to conjure meaningless hells.”

Like the small hole by the path-side something lives in, in me are lives I do not know the names of, nor the fates of, nor the hungers of or what they eat. They eat of me. Of small and blemished apples in low fields of me whose rocky streams and droughts I do not drink. And in my streets—the narrow ones, unlabeled on the self-map— they follow stairs down music ears can’t follow, and in my tongue borrowed by darkness, in hours uncounted by the self-clock, they speak in restless syllables of other losses, other loves. There too have been the hard extinctions, missing birds once feasted on and feasting. There too must be machines like loud ideas with tungsten bits that grind the day. A few escape. A mercy. They leave behind small holes that something unweighed by the self-scale lives in.

One look at the lilac, one smell and my childhood is — dogs scratching at the sliding glass door, bits of bottles coming up like grass in the grass, a dirty towel down by the feet of the tree, Lysol cans, small packets of Land O’Frost turkey meat — there in front of me in spring, in the wonderfully fat rain, flowering purple and whatever the pinkish purple is called and the white ones too. They smell like my siblings, like the backs of my infant son’s ears, like my son whom I would kill someone for. Before he was born I wouldn’t kill anyone. But now I would. And after I’d get a coffee from Starbucks, a coffee and a piece of that amazing lemon-frosted lemon cake and think nothing of it, and read the paper and hold him against my chest and listen to his body living, alive outside his mother’s body, and the lilac outside on the street, outside everyone, and heavy in the rain.

To perform death is something only humans would do No animal would sit there With a blank look on its face Just because the camera is there No no an animal would look directly in it Or cover its face, like the overweight Woman in the picture in the magazine By the room where I keep my bed What people don’t understand about beauty Is that after all it is not fleeting After all it is so gross to be that way That someone sees among you After all, to call into question I painted my lips, my eyes Only our scholars know that To perform is to be malleable To perform in language Or was it The large purple insect I let in the room Or was it the furred face — the hippo or the gorge That I was the devil in the wood In my own bones that I knew the face That I took that face Was it midnight blue sky No, were my wings iridescent Even in these lines The voice moves you What sense of exquisite cause Thought Moves you past these lines Into conversation With the undead I don’t know That is something You will have to answer for yourself I came back to this place to help you And that I did Shoot sparks of green and gray Through time What skin sack I put myself  in I mean for what, why, Or who Did I manage to do this for if not you Lilaced thing The soft rustle of  beetle wings In air that is warm and gray And is not strong But there, is there to carry us past it

Lilacs, False blue, White, Purple, Color of lilac, Your great puffs of flowers Are everywhere in this my New England. Among your heart-shaped leaves Orange orioles hop like music-box birds and sing Their little weak soft songs; In the crooks of your branches The bright eyes of song sparrows sitting on spotted eggs Peer restlessly through the light and shadow Of all Springs. Lilacs in dooryards Holding quiet conversations with an early moon; Lilacs watching a deserted house Settling sideways into the grass of an old road; Lilacs, wind-beaten, staggering under a lopsided shock of bloom Above a cellar dug into a hill. You are everywhere. You were everywhere. You tapped the window when the preacher preached his sermon, And ran along the road beside the boy going to school. You stood by the pasture-bars to give the cows good milking, You persuaded the housewife that her dishpan was of silver. And her husband an image of pure gold. You flaunted the fragrance of your blossoms Through the wide doors of Custom Houses— You, and sandal-wood, and tea, Charging the noses of quill-driving clerks When a ship was in from China. You called to them: “Goose-quill men, goose-quill men, May is a month for flitting.” Until they writhed on their high stools And wrote poetry on their letter-sheets behind the propped-up ledgers. Paradoxical New England clerks, Writing inventories in ledgers, reading the “Song of Solomon” at night, So many verses before bed-time, Because it was the Bible. The dead fed you Amid the slant stones of graveyards. Pale ghosts who planted you Came in the nighttime And let their thin hair blow through your clustered stems. You are of the green sea, And of the stone hills which reach a long distance. You are of elm-shaded streets with little shops where they sell kites and marbles, You are of great parks where every one walks and nobody is at home. You cover the blind sides of greenhouses And lean over the top to say a hurry-word through the glass To your friends, the grapes, inside. Lilacs, False blue, White, Purple, Color of lilac, You have forgotten your Eastern origin, The veiled women with eyes like panthers, The swollen, aggressive turbans of jeweled pashas. Now you are a very decent flower, A reticent flower, A curiously clear-cut, candid flower, Standing beside clean doorways, Friendly to a house-cat and a pair of spectacles, Making poetry out of a bit of moonlight And a hundred or two sharp blossoms. Maine knows you, Has for years and years; New Hampshire knows you, And Massachusetts And Vermont. Cape Cod starts you along the beaches to Rhode Island; Connecticut takes you from a river to the sea. You are brighter than apples, Sweeter than tulips, You are the great flood of our souls Bursting above the leaf-shapes of our hearts, You are the smell of all Summers, The love of wives and children, The recollection of gardens of little children, You are State Houses and Charters And the familiar treading of the foot to and fro on a road it knows. May is lilac here in New England, May is a thrush singing “Sun up!” on a tip-top ash tree, May is white clouds behind pine-trees Puffed out and marching upon a blue sky. May is a green as no other, May is much sun through small leaves, May is soft earth, And apple-blossoms, And windows open to a South Wind. May is full light wind of lilac From Canada to Narragansett Bay. Lilacs, False blue, White, Purple, Color of lilac. Heart-leaves of lilac all over New England, Roots of lilac under all the soil of New England, Lilac in me because I am New England, Because my roots are in it, Because my leaves are of it, Because my flowers are for it, Because it is my country And I speak to it of itself And sing of it with my own voice Since certainly it is mine.

The flowerets look edible before they open, like columns of sugar dots on tiny strips I bought as a child. Hard to bite the candy without some paper adhering, as adding machine tape will to large, red numbers. Lilacs are like that: another year unspools without major accomplishment, while I question "major" and "accomplishment." And when I find in Costco those clusters of pointillist pastel, I hope they will become someone else's nostalgia—honorable emotion propelling Ulysses toward Ithaca, and a woman to set lilacs in her dooryard as her mother did.

No one would take her when Ruth passed. As the survivors assessed some antiques, I kept hearing, "She's old. Somebody should put her down." I picked her up instead. Every night I tell her about the fish who died for her, the ones in the cheerful aluminum cans. She lies on my chest to sleep, rising and falling, rising and falling like a rowboat fastened to a battered dock by a string.

1 As she grows to twelve, her body begins Its Spring, its hike along the trail In the mountains that open Suddenly to show a whole valley So surprising one forgets For the moment to breathe. Her hips, and so her walk, Her breasts, and so The way she begins to see How other people look at her, How they are caught mid-breath, and shy. But the day a train first came here, They look at her like that: No one staring at her face, no one Noting a moustache curling up Like the arms of the bald He-man posing in the traveling circus There on the face of the engineer. She gets angry, steam in her head The way the engine had Barely held in, almost bursting. Angry in the manner that a person might Take an egg and hold it too hard. Her breasts begin to grow, And she gets angry. Or, she gets angry, So her breasts begin to grow. She cannot remember exactly which. Her mother had told her This would come, But told her so quickly, so much In a hurry and in a small room, And with the other things, She neglected to say that also They would stop growing, So they might not. She would have to wear— She learns this in a dream— High heels backward on her feet To keep a symmetry of balance. The angrier she gets through the months, The more worried she feels At the silliness of how She has begun to grow two new shoulders, Of how she will have to wear her shoes, As bigger, one centimeter at a time, She sprouts out like buds, at first, Like fast plants, Then, like the trees, And finally unstoppable In their season: fruit. The future, she reasons, cannot be good. 2 At 28, she has forgotten what is past. She sits and watches now her thighs Flowing out like the broad Varicosed backs of alligators She has seen in moving pictures, Pushed out around the metal Edges of the lawn chair. Long and flat animals, Sated and full of wrinkling Ridges, held as if by small bones The way camping tents are suspended, All from having eaten Too many pigs, too many birds and cows In the summers of her middle Years of crying When she was all mouth and chewing To feel better, all without boys, No Pedro of her own And now the boys cannot Come close, dare not Dare the alligators Which might come after them. 3 But no. This is an exaggeration, This sadness At het self. Sadness is like that, Adding weight to a thing, to legs The way legs look as one sits In a chair relaxed, Or on the edge of a wall. As if one were a circus performer With a partner, Ramón, Ramón standing Feet planted this moment precisely On the thighs. But no. This is a further exaggeration. Sadness again is like that, It learns you, she thinks, Makes you heavy in those places exactly You have dared think to be strong. On Thursday the 8th of this month Miguel her husband left her, But in that odd physics of how distance Increased every step she took Away from him. As she left the house, he got farther. As she, his María, walked out the door He left her, and the more she walked The farther he got, and smaller. She had learned him as one learns A pair of good leather shoes. She loved him so much She stopped thinking about him. He was like breathing. So that when sadness called, she went To see what it wanted And did not worry. Sadness, again, is like that, Not telling a person the whole story. 4 The orchard was his passion now More than women, More than hard words and fast guns In the hands of other men. And he tended his trees with fingers He might have used touching The hair of his young cousin, lovely Marta, his wife, light skinned, Eyes the color in the moss And barks of his trees, Who walked to the river and stayed. Fingers that might have Pointed out to her with care The beaten line a trail made Leading to his house, their house. But he was busy growing the limes So that her hair was like a bramble Having to be torn away Hard from her, leaving the blood.