1630 Nature poems

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.

Today I watched a boy fly his kite. It didn’t crackle in the wind – but gave out a barely perceptible hum. At a certain height, I’d swear I heard it sing. He could make it climb in any wind; could crank those angles up, make it veer with the precision of an insect targeting a sting; then he’d let it roil in rapturous finesse, a tiny bird in mid-air courtship. When lightning cracked across the cliff – (like quick pale flicks of yak-hair fly-whisks) – he stayed steady. For so long he kept his arms up, as if he knew he’d hoist that kite enough. I asked if it was made of special silk, if he used some particular string – and what he’d heard while holding it. He looked at me from a distance, then asked about my alms bowl, my robes, and about that for which a monk lives. It was then I saw I could tell him nothing in the cohort wind, that didn’t sound illusory.

Come March we’d find them In the five-and-dimes, Furled tighter than umbrellas About their slats, the air In an undertow above us Like weather on the maps. We’d play out lines Of kite string, tugging against The bucking sideways flights. Readied for assembly, I’d arc the tensed keel of balsa Into place against the crosspiece, Feeling the paper snap Tautly as a sheet, then lift The almost weightless body Up to where it hauled me Trolling into the winds— Knotted bows like vertebrae Flashing among fields Of light. Why ruin it By recalling the aftermaths? Kites gone down in tatters, Kites fraying like flotsam From the tops of the trees.

Complete in ourselves, we look like scraps of paper anyway: left alone, we could tell our mothers and one another our owners’ flimsiest secrets and play together all day until we became intertwined, which is why you try to keep us permanently apart. One of us is a gossamer pirate ship, a frigate whose rigging the industrial sunset highlights, sail by oblong sail. Another resembles a Greek letter —gamma, or lambda; others still a ligature, a propeller, a fat lip. Our will is not exactly the wind’s will. Underlined by sand, whose modes of coagulation and cohabitation none of the human pedestrians understand, we take off on our almost arbitrarily lengthy singletons of string towards the unattainable, scarily lofty realm of hawk and albatross and stay, backlit by cirrocumulus. It seems to be up to you to keep us up in the air, and to make sure our paths never cross.

As day began to break, we passed the “honk for worms” sign, passed it honking again and again, to wake up the worms my dad said. It was only about another half mile to the aspen grove and our worm digs. The humus, spongy and almost black, turned over easily. I used my bare hands to put some moist earth into a coffee can and, as the aspen glittered in the risen sun, I gently slid the fresh, fat bait into my container. I heard the worms still in the ground gurgle as they tried to escape, while the ones in the can began to ball up as their numbers grew. Streamside, surrounded by mountains with snow lingering into summer, I picked out a worm and my dad arranged it on the hook to save my small fingers. Now you can purchase a time-share on that land. The colony of aspen, thinned by the builders, continues to tremble. No amount of honking brings back the worms.

Among heart-shaped leaves the white fish gleams, red tail. Soft lotuses sleep.

Our shadows bring them from the shadows: a yolk-yellow one with a navy pattern like a Japanese woodblock print of fish scales. A fat 18-karat one splashed with gaudy purple and a patch of gray. One with a gold head, a body skim-milk-white, trailing ventral fins like half-folded fans of lace. A poppy-red, faintly disheveled one, and one, compact, all indigo in faint green water. They wear comical whiskers and gather beneath us as we lean on the cement railing in indecisive late-December light, and because we do not feed them, they pass, then they loop and circle back. Loop and circle. Loop. “Look,” you say, “beneath them.” Beneath them, like a subplot or a motive, is a school of uniformly dark ones, smaller, unadorned, perhaps another species, living in the shadow of the gold, purple, yellow, indigo, and white, seeking the mired roots and dusky grasses, unliveried, the quieter beneath the quiet.

Over our heads, trailing a wake of air and an enormous shadow as it passed, the falcon glided to its trainer’s fist and settled like a loaded weapon there. Then, while she fed the bird bit after bit of... what? rabbit? the trainer gave her talk: These birds, she said, prey on the small and weak, adding for the children’s benefit that this, though it seems cruel, is really good since otherwise the other rabbits, mice, squirrels, what have you, would run out of space and die of illness or a lack of food. I know what she was trying to get across, and I don’t doubt it would be healthier if we were more familiar than we are with how the natural world draws life from loss; and granted, nothing is more natural than death incarnate falling from the sky; and granted, it is better some should die, however agonizingly, than all. Still, to teach children this is how things go is one thing, to insist that it is good is something else—it is to make a god of an unsatisfactory status quo, this vicious circle that the clock hands draw and quarter, while the serpent bites its tail, or eats the dust, or strikes at someone’s heel, or winds up comprehended by a claw. She launched the bird again. We watched it climb out of the amphitheatre, headed toward the darkened spires of a nearby wood, then bank, then angle toward us one last time.

A few light flakes of snow Fall in the feeble sun; Birds sing in the cold, A warbler by the wall. The plum Buds tight and chill soon bloom. The moon begins first Fourth, a faint slice west At nightfall. Jupiter half-way High at the end of night- Meditation. The dove cry Twangs like a bow. At dawn Mt. Hiei dusted white On top; in the clear air Folds of all the gullied green Hills around the town are sharp, Breath stings. Beneath the roofs Of frosty houses Lovers part, from tangle warm Of gentle bodies under quilt And crack the icy water to the face And wake and feed the children And grandchildren that they love.

I like how the mallard ducklings goofy and weak waddle up the cement incline then slide into this runoff of lawn sprinklers and car washes and how the great blue heron seems to be teleported here from the Jurassic to look for extinct species of fish but mostly I like the way the little birds fly in and out of the barbed wire with only a smear of water to keep them singing.