1630 Nature poems

A lizard does not make a sound, it has no song, it does not share my love affairs with flannel sheets, bearded men, interlocking silver rings, the moon, the sea, or ink. But sitting here the afternoon, I’ve come to believe we do share a love affair and a belief — in wink, blink, stone, and heat. Also, air. This is not a fable, nor is it bliss. Impatience, remember this.

How much soil do you plow to soothe a conscience? If you’re a staked plains, dry-land, long view man: a sky’s worth. Some even sow the dry playa mid-summer with sorghum, the cotton plowed under after early hail. Thus, not every farmer keeps an old broken homestead sacred as a graveyard. Today, no Sharpshin on a pivot for an omen, no stoic farmer on a turn-row changing water. Among a little wind grit, in a grid on a grid, somewhere like the crossroads of outer space and Earth, Texas, a handful of ragged elms withstand a long sway of heat and wind. These old guards of a home haunt the field but wither even as ghosts must. Honor them with a walk among homesick bricks, and prophesy good.

Eastern Sea, 100 fathoms, green sand, pebbles, broken shells. Off Suno Saki, 60 fathoms, gray sand, pebbles, bubbles rising. Plasma-bearer and slow- motion benthos! The fishery vessel Ion drops anchor here collecting plankton smears and fauna. Plasma-bearer, visible sea purge, sponge and kelpleaf. Halicystus the Sea Bottle resembles emeralds and is the largest cell in the world. Young sea horse Hippocampus twenty minutes old, nobody has ever seen this marine freak blink. It radiates on terminal vertebra a comb of twenty upright spines and curls its rocky tail. Saltflush lobster bull encrusted swims backwards from the rock.

What a surprise it is to hear that locusts come the thirteenth year and not the seventeenth as told for ages and enshrined in old folklore and rhymes and family lies. The species similar otherwise: cicadas books call periodic, found here in our southern district. They grow from eggs pressed into twigs. The nymphs that hatch then start to dig at least ten inches into soil, and live by sucking juicy oil from roots and stems, sweet sap that nourishes through the giant nap, and then the lucky thirteenth year they grow a polished armor and crawl into the summer air and, louder than a Mahler choir, fill meadow, hedge, and orchard grove with necessary calls for love, then leave their eggs to fortune's whim with Philip Glass-like requiem.

In another poem, called The Logic of Spring, a mechanical drawing of a tree that I've passed a 100 times on my way to a different problem. I glance backwards, and the stack of the day multiplies, glancing backwards several times, the dog-eared corner with the graph paper sky of that morning and the logic of spring. Right before I wake, I hear the riposte of mean jays (blue dots that drag the pink banners of answers off the tree with words in gold italic latin) from the fog pumped in by the machine set on my lawn. First thing in the morning, (page numbers in all the dish rags hanging around the sink) I part the buttery curtains to see beyond the doric columns sitting on my porch & the hibiscus twig that someone has set the stump of such a tree—gray smudges and still intact line breaks with flashing pink splashes— outside my house while I slept. Seems unbearably cruel until I realize that in the flapping fog I finally hear its questions. Are you so easily distracted by pieces of a poem attached to a tree? in which as the situation changes you catch glimpses of yourself a series of emoticons.

Who has not waked to list the busy sounds Of summer’s morning, in the sultry smoke Of noisy London? On the pavement hot The sooty chimney-boy, with dingy face And tattered covering, shrilly bawls his trade, Rousing the sleepy housemaid. At the door The milk-pail rattles, and the tinkling bell Proclaims the dustman’s office; while the street Is lost in clouds impervious. Now begins The din of hackney-coaches, waggons, carts; While tinmen’s shops, and noisy trunk-makers, Knife-grinders, coopers, squeaking cork-cutters, Fruit-barrows, and the hunger-giving cries Of vegetable-vendors, fill the air. Now every shop displays its varied trade, And the fresh-sprinkled pavement cools the feet Of early walkers. At the private door The ruddy housemaid twirls the busy mop, Annoying the smart ’prentice, or neat girl, Tripping with band-box lightly. Now the sun Darts burning splendor on the glittering pane, Save where the canvas awning throws a shade On the gay merchandise. Now, spruce and trim, In shops (where beauty smiles with industry) Sits the smart damsel; while the passenger Peeps through the window, watching every charm. Now pastry dainties catch the eye minute Of humming insects, while the limy snare Waits to enthrall them. Now the lamp-lighter Mounts the tall ladder, nimbly venturous, To trim the half-filled lamps, while at his feet The pot-boy yells discordant! All along The sultry pavement, the old-clothes-man cries In tone monotonous, while sidelong views The area for his traffic: now the bag Is slyly opened, and the half-worn suit (Sometimes the pilfered treasure of the base Domestic spoiler), for one half its worth, Sinks in the green abyss. The porter now Bears his huge load along the burning way; And the poor poet wakes from busy dreams, To paint the summer morning.

Classically stagy, goose-neck elegant, river’s third eye. Pencil thin head. S for a throat. Skeleton of a saint. Plodder, preening posturer. One foot, another. Up from the dank weeds.

Up, up, slender As an eel’s Child, weaving Through water, our lonely Pipefish seeks out his dinner, Scanty at best; he blinks Cut-diamond eyes—snap—he Grabs morsels so small Only a lens pinpoints them, But he ranges all over That plastic preserve—dorsal Fin tremulous—snap—and Another çedilla Of brine shrimp’s gone ... We talk on of poetry, of love, Of grammar; he looks At a living comma— Snap—sizzling about In his two-gallon Caribbean And grazes on umlauts for breakfast. His pug nosed, yellow Mate, aproned in gloom, Fed rarely, slumped, Went deadwhite, as we argued on; That rudder fin, round as a Pizza cutter, at the End of his two inch Fluent stick self, lets his eyes Pilot his mouth—snap... Does his kind remember? Can our kind forget?

Madness “hath builded her house in the high places of the city.” — Guy Debord Men are hanging themselves unaccompanied by sound in the dark hours before the bottle shop opens Rope snaking a branch of pepper tree at the lodging house Empty tenement. Dark windows bruised by sky lighting rookeries of collapse and fire crumbling out until the whole street is vacant and mud caked In ragged brown of summer verticordia I peed near a midden of fleshy arils heaped at an anthill entrance watched them drag seed deep instilling acacia in dirt Withering of certainty spits hisses The swamps filling with drillholes guarded by adders Air churned with a fierce screaming warra! Warra. Dumbbell of yield and sequence Through years of discipline I learned containment or vice versa as natural as speechlike Upward spiral of spell A nested equivalence this woundedness Pinned fury petering in honeyeater as a falcon plucks its way to the warm core, feathers wafting down to soft eremophila Sentences in the Bible begin with And God As if starting was difficult and well populated An excess of tangle and downcast in need of name The roof rats went quietly once the python escaped to ceiling rafters of my father’s house its coagulation of coils echoing shapes of a nearby bogong moth

There’s a whisper down the field where the year has shot her yield, And the ricks stand grey to the sun, Singing: ‘Over then, come over, for the bee has quit the clover, ‘And your English summer's done.’ You have heard the beat of the off-shore wind, And the thresh of the deep-sea rain; You have heard the song—how long? how long? Pull out on the trail again! Ha’ done with the Tents of Shem, dear lass, We’ve seen the seasons through, And it’s time to turn on the old trail, our own trail, the out trail, Pull out, pull out, on the Long Trail—the trail that is always new! It’s North you may run to the rime-ringed sun Or South to the blind Horn’s hate; Or East all the way into Mississippi Bay, Or West to the Golden Gate— Where the blindest bluffs hold good, dear lass, And the wildest tales are true, And the men bulk big on the old trail, our own trail, the out trail, And life runs large on the Long Trail—the trail that is always new. The days are sick and cold, and the skies are grey and old, And the twice-breathed airs blow damp; And I’d sell my tired soul for the bucking beam-sea roll Of a black Bilbao tramp, With her load-line over her hatch, dear lass, And a drunken Dago crew, And her nose held down on the old trail, our own trail, the out trail From Cadiz south on the Long Trail—the trail that is always new. There be triple ways to take, of the eagle or the snake, Or the way of a man with a maid; But the sweetest way to me is a ship’s upon the sea In the heel of the North-East Trade. Can you hear the crash on her bows, dear lass, And the drum of the racing screw, As she ships it green on the old trail, our own trail, the out trail, As she lifts and ’scends on the Long Trail—the trail that is always new? See the shaking funnels roar, with the Peter at the fore, And the fenders grind and heave, And the derricks clack and grate, as the tackle hooks the crate, And the fall-rope whines through the sheave; It’s ‘Gang-plank up and in,’ dear lass, It’s ‘Hawsers warp her through!’ And it's ‘All clear aft’ on the old trail, our own trail, the out trail, We’re backing down on the Long Trail—the trail that is always new. O the mutter overside, when the port-fog holds us tied, And the sirens hoot their dread, When foot by foot we creep o’er the hueless, viewless deep To the sob of the questing lead! It’s down by the Lower Hope, dear lass, With the Gunfleet Sands in view, Till the Mouse swings green on the old trail, our own trail, the out trail, And the Gull Light lifts on the Long Trail—the trail that is always new. O the blazing tropic night, when the wake’s a welt of light That holds the hot sky tame, And the steady fore-foot snores through the planet-powdered floors Where the scared whale flukes in flame! Her plates are flaked by the sun, dear lass, And her ropes are taut with the dew, For we’re booming down on the old trail, our own trail, the out trail, We’re sagging south on the Long Trail—the trail that is always new. Then home, get her home, where the drunken rollers comb, And the shouting seas drive by, And the engines stamp and ring, and the wet bows reel and swing, And the Southern Cross rides high! Yes, the old lost stars wheel back, dear lass, That blaze in the velvet blue. They’re all old friends on the old trail, our own trail, the out trail, They’re God’s own guides on the Long Trail—the trail that is always new. Fly forward, O my heart, from the Foreland to the Start— We’re steaming all too slow, And it’s twenty thousand mile to our little lazy isle Where the trumpet-orchids blow! You have heard the call of the off-shore wind And the voice of the deep-sea rain; You have heard the song—how long?—how long? Pull out on the trail again! The Lord knows what we may find, dear lass, And The Deuce knows what we may do— But we’re back once more on the old trail, our own trail, the out trail, We’re down, hull-down, on the Long Trail—the trail that is always new!