1630 Nature poems

All day the ravens shit the buck whitetail back onto his antlers, the thick arcing tines graffitied with undigested tendons. Coyote- dragged, draped in a squawking garment that rises tattered when redtail-harried — revealing ribs, links of spine, tongue-clean sockets — and falls, in patches, back, stitched with wingsound. A feathered hush. Says you will go down in the dirt. First the four-leggeds ferrying your shape across the slough, yipping nothing resembling a name, large birds then like lamp-drawn moths, before the six-limbed elders arrive as one mind, as shifting soil, to polish what’s left, forsaking only the inedible brain.

Some day, I think, there will be people enough In Froxfield to pick all the blackberries

1 a wren, perched on a hawthorn low enough to skip the scalping winds, sang a scalpel song seafrets drift sheer along shorelines listening to hail spray glass and wind and a waitress laugh in a cafe without customers I fell to fell thinking * * * a sullen light through vapor thins a line of hills the edge of everything is nothing whipped by wind watched on a webcam bound to a bedpost gag on my shaft rose blush of road-kill rabbit insides out on tarmacadam * * * cumulus in a tarn its fast shadow flees far hills a wave of sleek grass skiffs mist my hand thought of her a photograph waiting to happen * * * this come-to-kill wind rips at the root here she comes and there she goes rushes bow to rime I should shut down close off stop if I could how quick the mist how quick 2 my lover, the assassin, is beautiful she has come to kill me and I concur just now she sleeps but when she wakes I’m dead her eyelids flitter as I prepare her potions, her delicious poisons * * * as she flew past a lick of her melodic nectar stuck to my wing, making flight, for an instant, sticky but nothing preening couldn’t fix * * * she asked about my heart, its evasive flight; but can I trust her with its secrets? and does the merlin, in fast pursuit of its prey, tell the fleeing lark it is enamored of its song? or the singing lark turn tail and fly into the falcon’s talons? * * * my heart, the cartographer, charts to the waterline, is swept back as the tide turns wiping the map blank, wave after moon-drawn wave but it beats, my heart, of its own volition a lark sings winds rush reeds walking home I stride these tracks with her tread the blurred thumbprint of a smudged moon 3 it has gone on for days strumming rushes taking up tales, taking them on the fall of my foot, on tufts a stroke of light along a law lain in under a long cloud I accrete—lichen to limestone sphagnum to peat * * * late shadows gather in the dark words unwrite as they are written unspeak as they are spoken songs sprung from heart and lung to tongue unsung * * * drunk winds stumble over shuffling roofs shake his sleep who dreams a lost love will not let go recurring swirls of old gold blown light you can’t help but be in it as it opens and falls back on itself unfolds and unsays I do not want to die without writing the unwritten pleasure of water

All the new birds are made of nothing. They have nothing inside (for anti-ballast) and those insides are surrounded in an outside nothing that has its own flibberti hole. The birds, they’re nothinging up there in the nothing trees, or on nothing roofs under a nothing sky. They fly of course, but what is flying if not nothing?

They so liked breast milk; Joanne fell asleep & leaked, the ants woke up, made the sweet climb. Others were surprised to find acidophilus, Soledad cleansing her inside sex — they made their way across her ivory sheets while she napped. Ah, the little guys were rejected by our sisters. But still, I feel sad that in my new lodgings there are no more glossy arrowheads to follow, sprinkle with baking powder, make a pretty cayenne path for over the once-food-strewn sill (they scent our past). They can carry their groceries bag-free: & ants shop in the honey cupboard, thirst like black hair being washed in a sink. Car-waxed black traffic jam — that’s actual jam, strawberry. Once my curatorial staff. But let them go on strike. Those embodiments of intention; they don’t sit around playing cards; perhaps they never play, never horse around. Hard-to-see-in-the-dark jet numbers on the radio dial. Perhaps there is no laughter in their chasm. Serious: but they’re able to stand up on hind legs — a darling trick. I want to give them a little inkwell. A beachball. The number of communal legs alone exceeds the stars underground. They could be an orchestra. A single one looks in the mirror & sees a note. A quarter note. So many instincts massing as one. If I miss one little lover, do I miss them all?

Here at the wolf’s throat, at the egress of the howl, all along the avenue of deer-blink and salmon-kick where the spider lets its microphone down into the cave of the blackberry bush—earth echo, absence of the human voice—wait here with a bee on your wrist and a fly on your cheek, the tiny sun and tiny eclipse. It is time to be grateful for the breath of what you could crush without thought, a moth, a child’s love, your own life. There might never be another chance. How did you find me, the astonished mother says to her four-year-old boy who’d disappeared in the crowds at the music festival. I followed my heart, he shrugs, so matter-of-fact you might not see behind his words (o hover and feed, but not too long) the bee trails turning to ice as they’re flown.

Late winter, almost spring. It's like finding a diamond; now I don't want to leave. I sit in the dirt and put my hands in your tracks. For the first time in a long time I don't doubt. Now I know I always knew you were here. You are the beginning of disclosure, the long-felt presence Suddenly incarnate. Behind me my friend warns, If we see the bear, get into a fetal position. No problem, I tell her, I'm always in a fetal position—I was born in a fetal position. Did you know, she says, the body of a shaved bear looks exactly like a human man? I skip a stone, feel a sudden bloat of grief, then laugh. I ask her, Who would shave a bear? We climb Farther up Rattlesnake Creek, watch winter sun glitter off dark water. No matter how high we go I look higher. Sometimes absence can prove presence. That's not exactly faith, I know. All day, everywhere, I feel you near at hand. There's so much to understand, and everything to prove. Up high the air is thin and hard, roars in the ears like love.

The first warm day, and by mid-afternoon the snow is no more than a washing strewn over the yards, the bedding rolled in knots and leaking water, the white shirts lying under the evergreens. Through the heaviest drifts rise autumn’s fallen bicycles, small carnivals of paint and chrome, the Octopus and Tilt-A-Whirl beginning to turn in the sun. Now children, stiffened by winter and dressed, somehow, like old men, mutter and bend to the work of building dams. But such a spring is brief; by five o’clock the chill of sundown, darkness, the blue TVs flashing like storms in the picture windows, the yards gone gray, the wet dogs barking at nothing. Far off across the cornfields staked for streets and sewers, the body of a farmer missing since fall will show up in his garden tomorrow, as unexpected as a tulip.

Saturday morning in late March. I was alone and took a long walk, though I also carried a book of the Alone, which companioned me. The day was clear, unnaturally clear, like a freshly wiped pane of glass, a window over the water, and blue, preternaturally blue, like the sky in a Magritte painting, and cold, vividly cold, so that you could clap your hands and remember winter, which had left a few moments ago— if you strained you could almost see it disappearing over the hills in a black parka. Spring was coming but hadn't arrived yet. I walked on the edge of the park. The wind whispered a secret to the trees, which held their breath and scarcely moved. On the other side of the street, the skyscrapers stood on tiptoe. I walked down to the pier to watch the launching of a passenger ship. Ice had broken up on the river and the water rippled smoothly in blue light. The moon was a faint smudge in the clouds, a brushstroke, an afterthought in the vacant mind of the sky. Seagulls materialized out of vapor amidst the masts and flags. Don't let our voices die on land, they cawed, swooping down for fish and then soaring back upwards. The kiosks were opening and couples moved slowly past them, arm in arm, festive. Children darted in and out of walkways, which sprouted with vendors. Voices greeted the air. Kites and balloons. Handmade signs. Voyages to unknown places. The whole day had the drama of an expectation. Down at the water, the queenly ship started moving away from the pier. Banners fluttered. The passengers clustered at the rails on deck. I stood with the people on shore and waved goodbye to the travelers. Some were jubilant; others were broken-hearted. I have always been both. Suddenly, a great cry went up. The ship set sail for the horizon and rumbled into the future but the cry persisted and cut the air like an iron bell ringing in an empty church. I looked around the pier but everyone else was gone and I was left alone to peer into the ghostly distance. I had no idea where that ship was going but I felt lucky to see it off and bereft when it disappeared.

I had not vomited in so long Someone put the hex on my true-to-selfness Some sorcerer kept me far from my guts The guts I feared would choke me And make me ashamed of having no wings And drown my own heart I know how to survive a feeling But I forgot that I knew it A manic forgetter froze my meats I kept asking for help when I didn't need it My demons stared out from the ice When they finally thawed they'd been dead all along And now I am the walking thawed You survive yourself if you wait long enough And vomit your guts down your defrosted breast And bathe in your mess and say baby it's fine