1630 Nature poems

The western waves of ebbing day Rolled o’er the glen their level way; Each purple peak, each flinty spire, Was bathed in floods of living fire. But not a setting beam could glow Within the dark ravines below, Where twined the path in shadow hid, Round many a rocky pyramid, Shooting abruptly from the dell Its thunder-splintered pinnacle; Round many an insulated mass, The native bulwarks of the pass, Huge as the tower which builders vain Presumptuous piled on Shinar’s plain. The rocky summits, split and rent, Formed turret, dome, or battlement, Or seemed fantastically set With cupola or minaret, Wild crests as pagod ever decked, Or mosque of Eastern architect. Nor were these earth-born castles bare, Nor lacked they many a banner fair; For, from their shivered brows displayed, Far o’er the unfathomable glade, All twinkling with the dewdrop sheen, The brier-rose fell in streamers green, And creeping shrubs, of thousand dyes, Waved in the west-wind’s summer sighs. Boon nature scattered, free and wild, Each plant or flower, the mountain’s child. Here eglantine embalmed the air, Hawthorn and hazel mingled there; The primrose pale, and violet flower, Found in each cliff a narrow bower; Fox-glove and night-shade, side by side, Emblems of punishment and pride, Grouped their dark hues with every stain The weather-beaten crags retain. With boughs that quaked at every breath, Gray birch and aspen wept beneath; Aloft, the ash and warrior oak Cast anchor in the rifted rock; And, higher yet, the pine-tree hung His shattered trunk, and frequent flung, Where seemed the cliffs to meet on high, His boughs athwart the narrowed sky. Highest of all, where white peaks glanced, Where glist’ning streamers waved and danced, The wanderer’s eye could barely view The summer heaven’s delicious blue; So wondrous wild, the whole might seem The scenery of a fairy dream. Onward, amid the copse ’gan peep A narrow inlet, still and deep, Affording scarce such breadth of brim As served the wild duck’s brood to swim. Lost for a space, through thickets veering, But broader when again appearing, Tall rocks and tufted knolls their face Could on the dark-blue mirror trace; And farther as the hunter strayed, Still broader sweep its channels made. The shaggy mounds no longer stood, Emerging from entangled wood, But, wave-encircled, seemed to float, Like castle girdled with its moat; Yet broader floods extending still Divide them from their parent hill, Till each, retiring, claims to be An islet in an inland sea. And now, to issue from the glen, No pathway meets the wanderer’s ken, Unless he climb, with footing nice A far projecting precipice. The broom’s tough roots his ladder made, The hazel saplings lent their aid; And thus an airy point he won, Where, gleaming with the setting sun, One burnished sheet of living gold, Loch Katrine lay beneath him rolled, In all her length far winding lay, With promontory, creek, and bay, And islands that, empurpled bright, Floated amid the livelier light, And mountains, that like giants stand, To sentinel enchanted land. High on the south, huge Benvenue Down to the lake in masses threw Crags, knolls, and mountains, confusedly hurled, The fragments of an earlier world; A wildering forest feathered o’er His ruined sides and summit hoar, While on the north, through middle air, Ben-an heaved high his forehead bare.

Brilliance is a carcass on a snow-white beach. Envy never sleeps. I tell my children truthfully: a long red beard is breaking from the darkness scale. He’s chasing you because you’re new. Because he’s old and sees the town in dirty tones: violet sheep and wine-dark corn. He burns the evening rainbow like a wartime bridge until it’s charred and charlatans topple out of  robin eggs and pox  your happy window by capturing the ledge and chattering like X-rays that crash into your flesh.

Is the woman in the pool of light really reading or just staring at what is written Is the man walking in the soft rain naked or is it the rain that makes his shirt transparent The boy in the iron cot is he asleep or still fingering the springs underneath Did you honestly believe three lives could be complete The bottle of green liquid on the sill is it real The bottle on the peeling sill is it filled with green Or is the liquid an illusion of fullness How summer’s children turn into fish and rain softens men How the elements of summer nights bid us to get down with each other on the unplaned floor And this feels painfully beautiful whether or not it will change the world one drop

Some dreams are like glass or a light beneath the surface of the water. A girl weeps in a garden. A woman turns her head and that is all. We wake up a hundred times and don't know where we are. Asleep at the wheel. Saved by the luck of angels. Everyone touching his lips to something larger, the watermark of some great sorrow. Everyone giving himself away. The way the rose gives up the stem and floats completely, without history. In the end every road leads to water. What is left of a garden is the dream, an alphabet of longing. The shadow of the girl. Perfume.

It should have a woman's name, something to tell us how the green skirt of land has bound its hips. When the day lowers its vermilion tapestry over the west ridge, the water has the sound of leaves shaken in a sack, and the child's voice that you have heard below sings of the sea. By slow movements of the earth's crust, or is it that her hip bones have been shaped by a fault of engineering? Some coquetry cycles this blue edge, a spring ready to come forth to correct love's mathematics. Saturday rises immaculately. The water's jade edge plays against corn-colored picnic baskets, rose and lemon bottles, red balloons, dancers in purple tights, a roan mare out of its field. It is not the moment to think of Bahia and the gray mother with her water explanation. Not far from here, the city, a mass of swift water in its own depression, licks its sores. Still, I would be eased by reasons. Sand dunes in drifts. Lava cuts its own bed at a mountain base. Blindness enters where the light refuses to go. In Loch Lomond, the water flowers with algae and a small life has taken the name of a star. You will hear my star-slow heart empty itself with a light-swift pitch where the water thins to a silence. And the woman who will not be named screams in the birth of her fading away.

I will arise and go now, and go to Innisfree, And a small cabin build there, of clay and wattles made; Nine bean-rows will I have there, a hive for the honey-bee, And live alone in the bee-loud glade. And I shall have some peace there, for peace comes dropping slow, Dropping from the veils of the morning to where the cricket sings; There midnight’s all a glimmer, and noon a purple glow, And evening full of the linnet’s wings. I will arise and go now, for always night and day I hear lake water lapping with low sounds by the shore; While I stand on the roadway, or on the pavements grey, I hear it in the deep heart’s core.

He wants to take her where birds grew legs long as rodeos, and a reimagined giant wombat tends to disappoint. He wants to drive her to a desert where they ghosted her in ochre, buried her, standing upright by a milky singing lake. He wants to walk with her along a curve of shattered moon, where human memory unmade her long ago. He wants to wake where sand blows yesterday from her face — where there is nothing but the terror of  his faith.

P.S. You will Do well to try to Innoculate the Indians by means of Blanketts, as well as to try Every other method that can serve to Extirpate this Execrable Race. — General Jeffery Amherst in a letter dated  July 16, 1763 Over the warming ground, swings toll like clock tower bells. Squirrels spiral the trunk of a pine. We fill a pail with sand. The day is robin’s eggshell fine. My mother’s shoulder had three shallow scars. Shining archipelago. The quiet theaters of our lives. Immune is a sung word, skirting sorrow. Kneeling at no registry of toddlers with amorphous voices. Night sweats without monument. The lake has the sea on its breath. One man has an island.

dans le simple appareil D’une beauté qu’on vient d’arracher au sommeil. Smoothed by sleep and ruffled by your dreams The surface of the little lake Fed by unconscious tributary streams, Unbroken by the breezes nightmares make, Like your face looks fathomless and seems Bottomless till light or noises wake. You move and murmur and almost awake. I admire but do not wish to enter, Like any wanderer beside Moonlit water in midwinter Who as a simulacrum for the tide Casting a pebble into the calm centre Watches the circles spread from side to side. I wait for you and morning at your side. Such sources feed the mirror of your mind, I dare not touch the surface of your sleep. But to love by ignorance resigned, Infatuated guardian, I keep Watch beside a fountain where I find No image, for images too deep, Above your breathing regular and deep.

Day and night, the lake dreams of sky. A privacy as old as the mountains And her up there, stuck among peaks. The whole eye Fastened on hawk, gatherings of cloud or stars, So little trespass. An airplane once Crossed her brow; she searched but could not find A face. Having lived with such strict beauty She comes to know how the sun is nothing But itself and the path it throws; the moon A riddled stone. If only a hand Would tremble along her cheek, would disturb. Even the elk Pass by, drawn to the spill of creeks below— How she cannot help abundance, even as it leaves Her, as it sings all the way down the mountain.