1630 Nature poems

Before the moths have even appeared to orbit around them, the streetlamps come on, a long row of them glowing uselessly along the ring of garden that circles the city center, where your steps count down the dulling of daylight. At your feet, a bee crawls in small circles like a toy unwinding. Summer specializes in time, slows it down almost to dream. And the noisy day goes so quiet you can hear the bedraggled man who visits each trash receptacle mutter in disbelief:Everything in the world is being thrown away! Summer lingers, but it’s about ending. It’s about how things redden and ripen and burst and come down. It’s when city workers cut down trees, demolishing one limb at a time, spilling the crumbs of twigs and leaves all over the tablecloth of street. Sunglasses! the man softly exclaims while beside him blooms a large gray rose of pigeons huddled around a dropped piece of bread.

Snow melts into the earth and a gentle breeze Loosens the damp gum wrappers, the stale leaves Left over from autumn, and the dead brown grass. The sky shakes itself out. And the invisible birds Winter put away somewhere return, the air relaxes, People start to circulate again in twos and threes. The dominant feelings are the blue sky, and the year. —Memories of other seasons and the billowing wind; The light gradually altering from difficult to clear As a page melts and a photograph develops in the backyard. When some men came to tear down the garage across the way The light was still clear, but the salt intoxication Was already dissipating into the atmosphere of constant day April brings, between the isolation and the flowers. Now the clouds are lighter, the branches are frosted green, And suddenly the season that had seemed so tentative before Becomes immediate, so clear the heart breaks and the vibrant Air is laced with crystal wires leading back from hell. Only the distraction, and the exaggerated sense of care Here at the heart of spring—all year long these feelings Alternately wither and bloom, while a dense abstraction Hides them. But now the mental dance of solitude resumes, And life seems smaller, placed against the background Of this story with the empty, moral quality of an expansive Gesture made up out of trees and clouds and air. The loneliness comes and goes, but the blue holds, Permeating the early leaves that flutter in the sunlight As the air dances up and down the street. Some kids yell. A white dog rolls over on the grass and barks once. And Although the incidents vary and the principal figures change, Once established, the essential tone and character of a season Stays inwardly the same day after day, like a person’s. The clouds are frantic. Shadows sweep across the lawn And up the side of the house. A dappled sky, a mild blue Watercolor light that floats the tense particulars away As the distraction starts. Spring here is at first so wary, And then so spare that even the birds act like strangers, Trying out the strange air with a hesitant chirp or two, And then subsiding. But the season intensifies by degrees, Imperceptibly, while the colors deepen out of memory, The flowers bloom and the thick leaves gleam in the sunlight Of another city, in a past which has almost faded into heaven. And even though memory always gives back so much more of What was there than the mind initially thought it could hold, Where will the separation and the ache between the isolated Moments go when summer comes and turns this all into a garden? Spring here is too subdued: the air is clear with anticipation, But its real strength lies in the quiet tension of isolation And living patiently, without atonement or regret, In the eternity of the plain moments, the nest of care —Until suddenly, all alone, the mind is lifted upward into Light and air and the nothingness of the sky, Held there in that vacant, circumstantial blue until, In the vehemence of a landscape where all the colors disappear, The quiet absolution of the spirit quickens into fact, And then, into death. But the wind is cool. The buds are starting to open on the trees. Somewhere up in the sky an airplane drones.

The worms which had been thick are thin upon the ground now that it's gotten later. They stick against the path, their pink chapped and their inching labored. It's a matter of moisture isn't it? Time, a measure of wet, shrinking, the drier you get.

I like Rosh Hashonah late, when the leaves are half burnt umber and scarlet, when sunset marks the horizon with slow fire and the black silhouettes of migrating birds perch on the wires davening. I like Rosh Hashonah late when all living are counting their days toward death or sleep or the putting by of what will sustain them— when the cold whose tendrils translucent as a jellyfish and with a hidden sting just brush our faces at twilight. The threat of frost, a premonition a warning, a whisper whose words we cannot yet decipher but will. I repent better in the waning season when the blood runs swiftly and all creatures look keenly about them for quickening danger. Then I study the rockface of my life, its granite pitted and pocked and pickaxed eroded, discolored by sun and wind and rain— my rock emerging from the veil of greenery to be mapped, to be examined, to be judged.

Wood strips, cross-purposed into lattice, made this nursery of interstices—a place that softened, then admitted, sun with shade, baffled the wind and rain, broke open space. It’s now more skeletal, a ghostly room the garden seemed to grow, in disrepair, long empty and well past its final bloom. Less lumbered, though, it cultivates the air by shedding cedar slats for open sky. As if, designed to never seem quite finished, it had a choice to seal and stultify or take its weather straight and undiminished, grow larger but be less precisely here, break with its elements, and disappear.

If I am not Ulysses, I am his dear, ruthless half brother. Strap me to the mast so I may endure night sirens singing my birth when water broke into a thousand blossoms in a landlocked town of the South, before my name was heard in the womb-shaped world of deep sonorous waters. Storms ran my ship to the brink, & I wasn't myself in a kingdom of unnamed animals & totem trees, but never wished to unsay my vows. From the salt-crusted timbers I could only raise a battering ram or cross, where I learned God is rhythm & spores. If I am Ulysses, made of his words & deeds, I swam with sea cows & mermaids in a lost season, ate oysters & poison berries to approach the idea of death tangled in the lifeline's slack on that rolling barrel of a ship, then come home to more than just the smell of apples, the heavy oars creaking the same music as our bed.

In the clear light that confuses everything Only you, dark laurel, Shadow my house, Lifting your arms in the anguish Of nature at the stake. And at night, quivering with tears, You are like the tree called Tasso’s. Crippled, and hooped with iron, It stands on Peter’s hill. When the lovers prop their bicycles And sit on the high benches That look across to eternity, That tree makes their own torsion Seem natural. And so, they’re comforted. 2 One of the local philosophers ... He says, “In California We have the old anarchist tradition.” What can he mean? Is there an anarchist tradition? And why would an anarchist want one? O California, Is there a tree without opinions? Come, let me clasp you! Let me feel the idea breathing. I too cry O for a life of sensations Rather than thoughts— “The sayling Pine, the Cedar proud and tall.” Like the girls in our neighborhood, They’re beautiful and silent. 3 As I was digging in the back yard I thought of a man in China. A lifetime, it seemed, we gazed at each other. I could see and hear his heartbeats Like a spade hurling clods. He pointed behind him, and I saw That the hills were covered with armed men, And they were all on the other side Of the life that I held dear. He said, “We are as various As the twigs of a tree, But now the tree moves as one man. It walks. And the earth trembles When a race of slaves is leaving.” 4 I said, “Yet, all these people Will fall down as one man When the entrails of a bomb are breathing. When we came down from Chosin Carrying the guns in dainty snow-wear And all the dead we had to, It was a time of forgetfulness, Like a plucked string. It was a river of darkness. Was it not so on your side, when you came To the sea that was covered with ships? Let us speak to each other, Let the word rise, making dark strokes in the air. That bird flies over the heads of the armed men.” 5 One part of the tree grows outward. The other I saw when, with a light, I explored the cellar—shattering roots. They had broken through the wall, As though there were something in my rubbish That life would have at last. I must be patient with shapes Of automobile fenders and ketchup bottles. These things are the beginning Of things not visible to the naked eye. It was so in the time of Tobit— The dish glowed when the angel held it. It is so that spiritual messengers Deliver their meaning.

The soil I’m walking over comes from deeper: a fire had done it in, a stewpot had suddenly popped and its contents streamed out wave over wave until it reached the water, until the sea called it a day and struck back with a counterwave. Stony nightblack dreambarren land where tawny thyme wrestles up and thistle is stitched to every bare thing. Over this malevolence I carry you in me, sevenmonths deadchild, out to the sea

Things are not unmoving (or else what is ing there for?) The things once-living fall on the never-living all the more movingly for the eye that passes over them. The wind wells up to spill a trail of onces off the nevers, take opaque from eye to mind, or near it — every rocking takes some leaving to a stonish spirit.

Now here is a typical children’s story that happens in gorgeous October when the mothers are coming in the afternoon, wearing brisk boots and windy skirts to pick up the little children from the day care center Frost in the air the maples golden and crimson my son in a leaf pile in the playground dreaming I am late, the playground is almost empty, my husband will kill me I gather my son to go home, he forgets his sweater in the playground and I send him back he dawdles, he is playing with leaves in his mind, it is already a quarter to six, will you come on I say and hurry along the corridor, there are yellow and blue rocket paintings, but I feel bad and ask what did you do today, do you recognize this story, the way he stands and picks his nose, move I say, do you want dinner or not I’m going to make a nice dinner, fried chicken I wheedle, so could you please walk a little faster, okay, I walk a little faster and get upstairs myself, pivot on boot-heel, nobody there, he is putting something in his mouth, his sable eyelashes downcast, and I am swooping down the stairwell screaming damn you that’s filthy I told you not before dinner We are climbing the stairs and I am crying, my son is not crying I have shaken him, I have pried the sweet from his cheek I have slapped his cheek like a woman slapping a carpet with all my strength mothers are very strong he is too young to do anything about this will not remember he remembers it The mind is a leaf pile where you can bury anything, pain, the image of a woman who wears a necklace of skulls, a screaming woman you dig quickly and deposit the pulpy thing you drop leaves on it and it stays there, that is the story that is sticking in my mind as we push the exit door, and run through the evening wind to my car where I jerk the gearshift and pick up a little speed, going along this neat suburban avenue full of maples the mark of my hand a blush on my son’s cheek.