1630 Nature poems

Each morning in the little white cabin by the river they woke to a raccoon clawing under the floorboards or banging in the wood stove. They did not discuss this. Instead they said it was a perfect day to pick blueberries on the hill, or that a hike to the old glassworks sounded good. They were beginning to speak not in meat but in the brown paper the butcher wraps around it. Brown paper around dirty magazines. Like dirty magazines, they only traced the contour of substance: silk over skin, skin over muscle, muscle over bone. What's under bone? Marrow? Their forks so small and dull. As if for dolls. You can tell dolls from animals because the latter are made of meat. Many eat it, also. Lions are interesting. Lions don't eat the flesh of their kills right away, but first lap up the blood, until the meat is blanched nearly white. White as the little cabin by the river they stayed in that summer. White as the raccoon covered in ashes, his black eyes bottomless and bright with hate.

I wait for you to come to brush your shoe against the blade of grass I'm sitting on touch me with your hand as you reach for one last violet to take home or pick up a worm to place gracefully in the garden even better if you lie on a hillside to watch the sunset or breathe in stars I will feel your warmth, bury my head next to that freckle on your calf, that hair on your forearm, or just behind the lobe of your left ear I promise not to take too much blood into my swelling body only what I think I need and I will never let you know I am here though I will love you deeply

Anything can be a bird if you’re not careful. I should say something nice about the weather. I should be in awe of the living, but the world dulls when I step into it. The squirrels scatter, the branches lift. Sure, I’ve hurt the ones I’ve loved by not paying attention.Not alone — never alone is a lesson I need to understand. It was you who said that. It’s you still. You who says,Look! You who points to the sky. You who tilts my chin toward the heron, who cups the minnow in your hands, who spots the deer miles ahead, who dulls the world with your absence. You who says,Look! & when I look, you are gone, replaced by the whitetail’s hind legs, fading into the bush.

for Thomas Edwards Wanning Think of the storm roaming the sky uneasily like a dog looking for a place to sleep in, listen to it growling. Think how they must look now, the mangrove keys lying out there unresponsive to the lightning in dark, coarse-fibred families, where occasionally a heron may undo his head, shake up his feathers, make an uncertain comment when the surrounding water shines. Think of the boulevard and the little palm trees all stuck in rows, suddenly revealed as fistfuls of limp fish-skeletons. It is raining there. The boulevard and its broken sidewalks with weeds in every crack are relieved to be wet, the sea to be freshened. Now the storm goes away again in a series of small, badly lit battle-scenes, each in "Another part of the field." Think of someone sleeping in the bottom of a row-boat tied to a mangrove root or the pile of a bridge; think of him as uninjured, barely disturbed.

God is not light upon light, no more than goat is need upon need although there, where it grazes, it is sun upon coat within which ticks and stray-blown feed burrow into the pocked skin of such foul scent covering the underflesh heart that could eat this farmer's grain or the barren mountain's bark high in the solitude of sheer animal peace laid over sheer animal terror. We ask the animal afflicted by its time, its impoverished American meadow that drove it to find birch from which to strip its easy feed to abide with us. It does not need us. We think it needs us. We must forgive God God's story.

I have one good memory—a total Eclipse of the sun—when out of brilliance Dusk came swiftly and on the whole At seven years it felt good on a summer afternoon To be outrun by a horse from another century— The next morning I washed up On land like a pod of seals Struck with a longing for dark at noon— If the cessation of feeling is temporary It resembles sleep—if permanent, it resembles A little ice age—and the end of some Crewelwork by a mother who put honey Into my hands so the bees would love me.

little tree little silent Christmas tree you are so little you are more like a flower who found you in the green forest and were you very sorry to come away? see          i will comfort you because you smell so sweetly i will kiss your cool bark and hug you safe and tight just as your mother would, only don't be afraid look          the spangles that sleep all the year in a dark box dreaming of being taken out and allowed to shine, the balls the chains red and gold the fluffy threads, put up your little arms and i'll give them all to you to hold every finger shall have its ring and there won't be a single place dark or unhappy then when you're quite dressed you'll stand in the window for everyone to see and how they'll stare! oh but you'll be very proud and my little sister and i will take hands and looking up at our beautiful tree we'll dance and sing "Noel Noel"

There was a little turtle. He lived in a box. He swam in a puddle. He climbed on the rocks. He snapped at a mosquito. He snapped at a flea. He snapped at a minnow. And he snapped at me. He caught the mosquito. He caught the flea. He caught the minnow. But he didn't catch me.

The grand road from the mountain goes shining to the sea, And there is traffic in it and many a horse and cart, But the little roads of Cloonagh are dearer far to me, And the little roads of Cloonagh go rambling through my heart. A great storm from the ocean goes shouting o’er the hill, And there is glory in it and terror on the wind, But the haunted air of twilight is very strange and still, And the little winds of twilight are dearer to my mind. The great waves of the Atlantic sweep storming on their way, Shining green and silver with the hidden herring shoal, But the Little Waves of Breffny have drenched my heart in spray, And the Little Waves of Breffny go stumbling through my soul.

It’s said they planted trees by graves to soak up spirits of the dead through roots into the growing wood. The favorite in the burial yards I knew was common juniper. One could do worse than pass into such a species. I like to think that when I’m gone the chemicals and yes the spirit that was me might be searched out by subtle roots and raised with sap through capillaries into an upright, fragrant trunk, and aromatic twigs and bark, through needles bright as hoarfrost to the sunlight for a century or more, in wood repelling rot and standing tall with monuments and statues there on the far hill, erect as truth, a testimony, in ground that’s dignified by loss, around a melancholy tree that’s pointing toward infinity.