1630 Nature poems

among thirty dusty men the only wet thing the mouth of the coyote is a mini zoo we are from many countries in which there are many coyotes 500 bucks and we’re off think about it is the shortest verse of a corrido a gila monster and a coyote are one a gila monster and a coyote and a gringo are one strewn bottles melt dirt the coyote’s tongue fills them we don’t know which to swat the coyote or the froth the mosquitoes or the flies gringos why do you see us illegal don’t you think we are the workers around you we speak different accents yours included and we know también the coyote is suspect of what we say when the coyote hears helicopters in Nike shoes he trots Arizona Nogales whores close their doors the coyote trots Arizona in Nike shoes the desert is still the coyote must be tired in his shadow he sees searchlights it’s day all night it’s dusting and it’s going to dust the coyote rests under yuccas

Listen closely as I sing this. The man standing at the gate tottering on his remaining limb is a kind of metronome, his one leg planted firmly on the earth. Yes, I have made him beautiful because I aim to lay all my cards on the table. In the book review the critic writes, “Barry seeks not to judge but to understand.” Did she want us to let her be, or does she want to be there walking the grounds of the old prison on the hill of the poison tree where comparatively a paltry twenty thousand died? In the first room with the blown up black-and-white of a human body gone abstract someone has to turn and face the wall not because of the human pain represented in the photo but because of her calmness, the tranquility with which she tells us that her father and her sister and her brother were killed. In graduate school a whole workshop devoted to an image of a woman with bleach thrown in the face and the question of whether or not the author could write, “The full moon sat in the window like a calcified eye, the woman’s face aglow with a knowingness.” I felt it come over me and I couldn’t stop. I tried to pull myself together and I couldn’t. They were children. An army of child soldiers. In the room papered with photos of the Khmer Rouge picture after picture of teenagers, children whose parents were killed so that they would be left alone in the world to do the grisly work that precedes paradise. And the photos of the victims, the woman holding her newborn in her arms as her head is positioned in a vise, in this case the vise an instrument not of torture but of documentation, the head held still as the camera captures the image, the thing linking all their faces, the abject fear and total hopelessness as exists in only a handful of places in the history of the visible world. For three $US per person she will guide you through what was Tuol Sleng prison, hill of the strychnine tree. Without any affectation she will tell you the story of how her father and her sister and her brother went among the two million dead. There are seventy-four forms of poetry in this country and each one is still meant to be sung.

Say, when we woke those icy spring mornings they were still there. The upper portion of their faces long ruined but you could still see the meaning in their hands, palms once covered in gold. We knew better than to call them by their names, Light that Shines Throughout the Universe and His consort, but there were stories of  travelers lost  in the foothills of  the Hindu  Kush and a distant brilliance that led them home. The way a candle physically enters your body after it has been snuffed out. The pearly smoke suffused in the air. In one school hundreds  of  miles  away  all  the   girls  my age  were  poisoned, and last week outside the capital a woman like my  sister was shot dead  in front of a crowd by two men who forced their bodies into her body and then judged her an infidel so they could kill her and be done with it.  After the  visitors were blasted I had a dream. I saw a human man standing by a lake and no one was looking at him directly. His image on the surface of the water cleaner than anything in this world. In   my   dream  the  man   said,  “Thousands   of  lifetimes  ago when my body was cut into pieces by an evil king, I was not caught up in the idea of the self.” Then  in  my   dream  someone   picked  up  a rock  and  I  woke  up. It took almost a month, the  great  heads  drilled with holes,  then anti-aircraft  tanks rolled in. Each hundred-foot niche now empty but each cavity left shaped like us, like a person. Before it happened we talked about it. Grandfather said don’t they have a share in heaven? Second Aunt said it was more realistic this way. God not in heaven but in exile.

Somebody says draw a map. Populate it with the incidents of your childhood. Mark the spot where the lake receded after a winter of light snow. The stairs on which someone slapped you. The place where the family dog hung itself by jumping over the back fence while still on the dog run, hours later its body like a limp flag on a windless day. Draw a map, someone says. Let yourself remember. In the refugee camp a hundred thousand strong draw the stony outcrop from which you could no longer see the plume of smoke that was your village. Draw a square for the bathroom stall where Grandpa hid each day in order to eat his one egg free from the starving eyes of his classmates, an X for the courthouse where you and he were naturalized, a broken line for the journey. Draw a map, Jon says. Let it be your way into the poem. Here is where that plane filled with babies crashed that I was not on. Here is where I was ashamed. On the second floor at Pranash University the people wait their turn. Have you drawn your map, Jon asks. He has rolled up his sleeves. Forty-five minutes to noon the Prince stands up and says that the monks must be excused. We watch them file out, saffron robes as if their bodies have burst into blossom. Draw a map. Fly halfway around the globe. Here is the room next to the library where you realize how poor your tradition is, the local people with poetic forms still in use that date back to the time of Christ. Tell us about your map. Explain how these wavy lines represent the river, this rectangle the school-turned-prison where only seven escaped with their lives. This is my map. This star the place where I sat in a roomful of people among whom not one was not touched by genocide. Every last map resplendent with death though nobody knows where their loved ones lie buried. How many times can I appropriate a story that is not mine to tell? The woman stands up and says she is not a poet, that she doesn’t have the words. She points to a triangle on a piece of paper. Here is the spot where she found human bones in the well of her childhood home, and how her mother told her don’t be afraid because it was not the work of wild animals.

I’d given up hope. Hadn’t eaten in three days. Resigned to being wolf meat ... when, unbelievably, I found myself in a clearing. Two goats with bells round their necks stared at me: their pupils like coin slots in piggy banks. I could have gotten the truth out of those two, if goats spoke. I saw leeks and radishes planted in rows; wash billowing on a clothesline ... and the innocuous-looking cottage in the woods with its lapping tongue of a welcome mat slurped me in. In the kitchen, a woman so old her sex is barely discernible pours a glass of fraudulent milk. I’m so hungry my hand shakes. But what is this liquid? “Drink up, sweetheart,” she says, and as I wipe the white mustache off with the back of my hand: “Atta girl.” Have I stumbled into the clutches of St. Somebody? Who can tell. “You’ll find I prevail here in my own little kingdom,” she says as she leads me upstairs—her bony grip on my arm a proclamation of ownership, as though I've always been hers.

—shored by trees at its far ending, as is the way in moral tales: whether trees as trees actually, for their shadow and what inside of it hides, threatens, calls to; or as ever-wavering conscience, cloaked now, and called Chorus; or, between these, whatever falls upon the rippling and measurable, but none to measure it, thin fabric of this stands for. A kind of meadow, and then trees—many, assembled, a wood therefore. Through the wood the worn path, emblematic of Much Trespass:Halt. Who goes there? A kind of meadow, where it ends begin trees, from whose twinning of late light and the already underway darkness you were expecting perhaps the stag to step forward, to make of its twelve-pointed antlers the branching foreground to a backdrop all branches; or you wanted the usual bird to break cover at that angle at which wings catch entirely what light’s left, so that for once the bird isn’t miracle at all, but the simplicity of patience and a good hand assembling: first the thin bones, now in careful rows the feathers, like fretwork, now the brush, for the laying-on of sheen....As is always the way, you tell yourself,in poems—Yes, always, until you have gone there, and gone there, “into the field,” vowing Only until there’s nothing more I want— thinking it, wrongly, a thing attainable, any real end to wanting, and that it is close, and that it is likely, how will you not this time catch hold of it: flashing, flesh at once lit and lightless, a way out, the one dappled way, back—

Soon the ambassadors from the Netherworld Will begin Their jet-like descent. Death, Disguised inside me, already, As sleaze. Grime and her magnificent seed. Brother Rainer Clutching his Bible, hallucinating helicopters. Brother Rainer, child-like and wrecked. Infamy, and the cosmology of chronic Raveling and unraveling. Or, Displaced insanity. Dirty Cindy, little Glitter of her father’s Spit: invisible, androgynous, a fragment of His, found at the bottom of his dream chest. Draped in my black cape of smut glue and Subterranean, they mistake me for A man in drag in my nasty Boots. Why just look: a manifestation Of stars. Or, appoint me hustler of Brutal Rainer and his kinky noir Scheme: me, at thirteen, on the beach In a candy-striped bikini. In time or out of time, Glamorine. Groom of the Underworld, please Come with me To the discotheque at the end Of the world. Piss- Elegant at the halfway House for the trashed and gone galore. Meet me in the love- Burned orchard Where the beautiful doomed Meet at last.

In a year the nightingales were said to be so loud they drowned out slumber, and peafowl strolled screaming beside the ruined nunnery, through the long evening of a dazzled pub crawl, the halcyon color, portholed by those eye-spots’ stunning tapestry, unsettled the pastoral nightfall with amazements opening. Months later, intermission in a pub on Fifty-fifth Street found one of them still breathless, the other quizzical, acting the philistine, puncturing Stravinsky—“Tell me, what was that racket in the orchestra about?”— hauling down the Firebird, harum-scarum, like a kite, a burnished, breathing wreck that didn’t hurt at all. Among the Bronx Zoo’s exiled jungle fowl, they heard through headphones of a separating panic, the bellbird reiterate its single chong, a scream nobody answered. When he mourned, “The poetry is gone,” she quailed, seeing how his hands shook, sobered into feeling old. By midnight, yet another fifth would have been killed. A Sunday morning, the November of their cataclysm (Dylan Thomas brought in in extremis to St. Vincent’s, that same week, a symptomatic datum) found them wandering a downtown churchyard. Among its headstones, while from unruined choirs the noise of Christendom poured over Wall Street, a benison in vestments, a late thrush paused, in transit from some grizzled spruce bog to the humid equatorial fireside: berry- eyed, bark-brown above, with dark hints of trauma in the stigmata of its underparts—or so, too bruised just then to have invented anything so fancy, later, re-embroidering a retrospect, she had supposed. In gray England, years of muted recrimination (then dead silence) later, she could not have said how many spoiled takeoffs, how many entanglements gone sodden, how many gaudy evenings made frantic by just one insomniac nightingale, how many liaisons gone down screaming in a stroll beside the ruined nunnery; a kingfisher’s burnished plunge, the color of felicity afire, came glancing like an arrow through landscapes of untended memory: ardor illuminating with its terrifying currency now no mere glimpse, no porthole vista but, down on down, the uninhabitable sorrow.

1 What does not change / is the will to change He woke, fully clothed, in his bed. He remembered only one thing, the birds, how when he came in, he had gone around the rooms and got them back in their cage, the green one first, she with the bad leg, and then the blue, the one they had hoped was a male Otherwise? Yes, Fernand, who had talked lispingly of Albers & Angkor Vat. He had left the party without a word. How he got up, got into his coat, I do not know. When I saw him, he was at the door, but it did not matter, he was already sliding along the wall of the night, losing himself in some crack of the ruins. That it should have been he who said, “The kingfishers! who cares for their feathers now?” His last words had been, “The pool is slime.” Suddenly everyone, ceasing their talk, sat in a row around him, watched they did not so much hear, or pay attention, they wondered, looked at each other, smirked, but listened, he repeated and repeated, could not go beyond his thought “The pool    the kingfishers’ feathers were wealth    why did the export stop?” It was then he left 2 I thought of the E on the stone, and of what Mao said la lumiere” but the kingfisher de l’aurore” but the kingfisher flew west est devant nous! he got the color of his breast from the heat of the setting sun! The features are, the feebleness of the feet (syndactylism of the 3rd & 4th digit) the bill, serrated, sometimes a pronounced beak, the wings where the color is, short and round, the tail inconspicuous. But not these things were the factors. Not the birds. The legends are legends. Dead, hung up indoors, the kingfisher will not indicate a favoring wind, or avert the thunderbolt. Nor, by its nesting, still the waters, with the new year, for seven days. It is true, it does nest with the opening year, but not on the waters. It nests at the end of a tunnel bored by itself in a bank. There, six or eight white and translucent eggs are laid, on fishbones not on bare clay, on bones thrown up in pellets by the birds. On these rejectamenta (as they accumulate they form a cup-shaped structure) the young are born. And, as they are fed and grow, this nest of excrement and decayed fish becomes a dripping, fetid mass Mao concluded: nous devons nous lever et agir! 3 When the attentions change / the jungle leaps in even the stones are split they rive Or, enter that other conqueror we more naturally recognize he so resembles ourselves But the E cut so rudely on that oldest stone sounded otherwise, was differently heard as, in another time, were treasures used: (and, later, much later, a fine ear thought a scarlet coat) “of green feathers    feet, beaks and eyes of gold “animals likewise, resembling snails “a large wheel, gold, with figures of unknown four-foots, and worked with tufts of leaves, weight 3800 ounces “last, two birds, of thread and featherwork, the quills gold, the feet gold, the two birds perched on two reeds gold, the reeds arising from two embroidered mounds, one yellow, the other white. “And from each reed hung seven feathered tassels. In this instance, the priests (in dark cotton robes, and dirty, their disheveled hair matted with blood, and flowing wildly over their shoulders) rush in among the people, calling on them to protect their gods And all now is war where so lately there was peace, and the sweet brotherhood, the use of tilled fields. 4 Not one death but many, not accumulation but change, the feed-back proves, the feed-back is the law Into the same river no man steps twice When fire dies air dies No one remains, nor is, one Around an appearance, one common model, we grow up many. Else how is it, if we remain the same, we take pleasure now in what we did not take pleasure before? love contrary objects? admire and / or find fault? use other words, feel other passions, have nor figure, appearance, disposition, tissue the same? To be in different states without a change is not a possibility We can be precise. The factors are in the animal and / or the machine the factors are communication and / or control, both involve the message. And what is the message? The message is a discrete or continuous sequence of measurable events distributed in time is the birth of the air, is the birth of water, is a state between the origin and the end, between birth and the beginning of another fetid nest is change, presents no more than itself And the too strong grasping of it, when it is pressed together and condensed, loses it This very thing you are II They buried their dead in a sitting posture serpent    cane    razor   ray of the sun And she sprinkled water on the head of my child, crying “Cioa-coatl! Cioa-coatl!” with her face to the west Where the bones are found, in each personal heap with what each enjoyed, there is always the Mongolian louse The light is in the east. Yes. And we must rise, act. Yet in the west, despite the apparent darkness (the whiteness which covers all), if you look, if you can bear, if you can, long enough as long as it was necessary for him, my guide to look into the yellow of that longest-lasting rose so you must, and, in that whiteness, into that face, with what candor, look and, considering the dryness of the place the long absence of an adequate race (of the two who first came, each a conquistador, one healed, the other tore the eastern idols down, toppled the temple walls, which, says the excuser were black from human gore) hear hear, where the dry blood talks where the old appetite walks la piu saporita et migliore che si possa truovar al mondo where it hides, look in the eye how it runs in the flesh / chalk but under these petals in the emptiness regard the light, contemplate the flower whence it arose with what violence benevolence is bought what cost in gesture justice brings what wrongs domestic rights involve what stalks this silence what pudor pejorocracy affronts how awe, night-rest and neighborhood can rot what breeds where dirtiness is law what crawls below III I am no Greek, hath not th’advantage. And of course, no Roman: he can take no risk that matters, the risk of beauty least of all. But I have my kin, if for no other reason than (as he said, next of kin) I commit myself, and, given my freedom, I’d be a cad if I didn’t. Which is most true. It works out this way, despite the disadvantage. I offer, in explanation, a quote: si j’ai du goût, ce n’est guères que pour la terre et les pierres. Despite the discrepancy (an ocean    courage    age) this is also true: if I have any taste it is only because I have interested myself in what was slain in the sun I pose you your question: shall you uncover honey / where maggots are? I hunt among stones

For my grandmother I am water, only because you are the ocean. We are here, only because old leaves have been falling. A mulching of memories folding into buried hands. The cliffs we learn to edge. The tree trunk hollowed, humming. I am a tongue, only because you are the body planting stories with thumb. Soil crumbs cling to your knees. Small stacks of empty clay pots dreaming. I am an air plant suspended, only because you are the trunk I cling to. I am the milky fish eye, only because it’s your favorite. Even the sound you make when your lips kiss the opelu socket is a mo‘olelo. A slipper is lost in the yard. A haku lei is chilling in the icebox. I am a cup for feathers, only because you want to fill the hours. I am a turning wrist, only because you left the hose on. Heliconias are singing underwater. Beetles are floating across the yard.