the sweet children, dangling their pretty feet
into the darkness.
And now will come—I can count on it—the murky splash,
the certain victory
of that pink and gassy mouth, and the frantic
circling of the hen while the rest of the chicks
flare away over the water and into the reeds, and my heart
will be most mournful
on their account. But, listen,
what’s important?
Nothing’s important
except that the great and cruel mystery of the world,
of which this is a part,
not be denied. Once,
I happened to see, on a city street, in summer,
a dusty, fouled turtle plodding along—
a snapper—
broken out I suppose from some backyard cage—
and I knew what I had to do—
I looked it right in the eyes, and I caught it—
I put it, like a small mountain range,
into a knapsack, and I took it out
of the city, and I let it
down into the dark pond, into
the cool water,
and the light of the lilies,
to live.
THE DEER
You never know.
The body of night opens
like a river, it drifts upward like white smoke,
like so many wrappings of mist.
And on the hillside two deer are walking along
just as though this wasn’t
the owned, tilled earth of today
but the past.
I did not see them the next day, or the next,
but in my mind’s eye—
there they are, in the long grass,
like two sisters.
This is the earnest work. Each of us is given
only so many mornings to do it—
to look around and love
the oily fur of our lives,
the hoof and the grass-stained muzzle.
Days I don’t do this
I feel the terror of idleness,
like a red thirst.
Death isn’t just an idea.
When we die the body breaks open
like a river;
the old body goes on, climbing the hill.
THE LOON ON OAK-HEAD POND
cries for three days, in the gray mist.
cries for the north it hopes it can find.
plunges, and comes up with a slapping pickerel.
blinks its red eye.
cries again.
you come every afternoon, and wait to hear it.
you sit a long time, quiet, under the thick pines,
in the silence that follows.
as though it were your own twilight.
as though it were your own vanishing song.
WHAT IS IT?
Who can say,
is it a snowy egret
or a white flower
standing
at the glossy edge
of the lily-
and frog-filled pond?
Hours ago the orange sun
opened the cups of the lilies
and the leopard frogs
began kicking
their long muscles,
breast-stroking
like little green dwarves
under the roof of the rich,
iron-colored water.
Now the soft
eggs of the salamander
in their wrappings of jelly
begin to shiver.
They’re tired of sleep.
They have a new idea.
They want to swim away
into the world.
Who could stop them?
Who could tell them
to go cautiously, to flow slowly
under the lily pads?
Off they go,
hundreds of them,
like the black
fingerprints of the rain.
The frogs freeze
into perfect five-fingered
shadows, but suddenly the flower
has fire-colored eyes
and one of the shadows vanishes.
Clearly, now, the flower is a bird.
It lifts its head,
it lifts the hinges
of its snowy wings,
tossing a moment of light
in every direction,
like a chandelier,
and then once more is still.
The salamanders,
like tiny birds, locked into formation,
fly down into the endless mysteries
of the transforming water,
and how could anyone believe
that anything in this world
is only what it appears to be—
that anything is ever final—
that anything, in spite of its absence,
ever dies
a perfect death?
WRITING POEMS
This morning I watched
the pale green cones of the rhododendrons
opening their small pink and red blouses—
the bodies of the flowers
were instantly beautiful to the bees, they hurried
out of that dark place in the thick tree
one after another, an invisible line
upon which their iridescence caught fire
as the sun caught them, sliding down.
Is there anything more important
than hunger and happiness? Each bee entered
the frills of a flower to find
the sticky fountain, and if some dust
spilled on the walkways of the petals
and caught onto their bodies, I don’t know
if the bees know that otherwise death
is everywhere, even in the red swamp
of a flower. But they did this
with no small amount of desperation—you might say: love.
And the flowers, as daft as mud, poured out their honey.
SOME HERONS
A blue preacher
flew toward the swamp,
in slow motion.
On the leafy banks,
an old Chinese poet,
hunched in the white gown of his wings,
was waiting.
The water
was the kind of dark silk
that has silver lines
shot through it
when it is touched by the wind
or is splashed upward,
in a small, quick flower,
by the life beneath it.
The preacher
made his difficult landing,
his skirts up around his knees.
The poet’s eyes
flared, just as a poet’s eyes
are said to do
when the poet is awakened
from the forest of meditation.
It was summer.
It was only a few moments past the sun’s rising,
which meant that the whole long sweet day
lay before them.
They greeted each other,
rumpling their gowns for an instant,
and then smoothing them.
They entered the water,
and instantly two more herons—
equally as beautiful—
joined them and stood just beneath them
in the black, polished water
where they fished, all day.
FIVE A.M. IN THE PINEWOODS
I’d seen
their hoofprints in the deep
needles and knew
they ended the long night
under the pines, walking
like two mute
and beautiful women toward
the deeper woods, so I
got up in the dark and
went there. They came
slowly down the hill
and looked at me sitting under
the blue trees, shyly
they stepped
closer and stared
from under their thick lashes and even
nibbled some damp
tassels of weeds. This
is not a poem about a dream,
though it could be.
This is a poem about the world
that is ours, or could be.
Finally
one of them—I swear it!—
would have come to my arms.
But the other
stamped sharp hoof in the
pine needles like
the tap of sanity,
and they went off together through
the trees. When I woke
I was alone,
I was thinking:
so this is how you swim inward,
so this is how you flow outward,
so this is how you pray.
LITTLE OWL WHO LIVES IN THE ORCHARD
His beak could open a bottle,
and his eyes—when he lifts their soft lids—
go on reading something
just beyond your shoulder—
Blake, maybe,
or the Book of Revelation.
Never mind that he eats only
the black-smocked crickets,
and dragonflies if they happen
to be out late over the ponds, and of course
the occasional festal mouse.
Never mind that he is only a memo
from the offices of fear—
it’s not size but surge that tells us
when we’re in touch with something real,
and when I hear him in the orchard
fluttering
down the little aluminum
ladder of his scream—
when I see his wings open, like two black ferns,
a flurry of palpitations
as cold as sleet
rackets across the marshlands
of my heart,
like a wild spring day.
Somewhere in the universe,
in the gallery of important things,
the babyish owl, ruffled and rakish,
sits on its pedestal.
Dear, dark dapple of plush!
A message, reads the label,
from that mysterious conglomerate:
Oblivion and Co.
The hooked head stares
from its blouse of dark, feathery lace.
It could be a valentine.
THE GIFT
I wanted to thank the mockingbird for the vigor of his song.
Every day he sang from the rim of the field, while I picked blueberries or just idled in the sun.
Every day he came fluttering by to show me, and why not, the white blossoms in his wings.
So one day I went there with a machine, and played some songs of Mahler.
The mockingbird stopped singing, he came close and seemed to listen.
Now when I go down to the field, a little Mahler spills through the sputters of his song.
How happy I am, lounging in the light, listening as the music floats by!
And I give thanks also for my mind, that thought of giving a gift.
And mostly I’m grateful that I take this world so seriously.
PIPEFISH
In the green
and purple weeds
called Zostera, loosely
swinging in the shallows,
I waded, I reached
my hands
in that most human
of gestures—to find,
to see,
to hold whatever it is
that’s there—
and what came up
wasn’t much
but it glittered
and struggled,
it had eyes, and a body
like a wand,
it had pouting lips.
No longer,
all of it,
than any of my fingers,
it wanted
away from my strangeness,
it wanted
to go back
into that waving forest
so quick and wet.
I forget
when this happened,
how many years ago
I opened my hands—
like a promise
I would keep my whole life,
and have—
and let it go.
I tell you this
in case you have yet to wade
into the green
and purple shallows
where the diminutive
pipefish
wants to go on living.
I tell you this
against everything you are—
your human heart,
your hands passing over the world,
gathering and closing,
so dry and slow.
THE KOOKABURRAS
In every heart there is a coward and a procrastinator.
In every heart there is a god of flowers, just waiting
to come out of its cloud and lift its wings.
The kookaburras, kingfishers, pressed against the edge of
their cage, they asked me to open the door.
Years later I wake in the night and remember how I said to them,
no, and walked away.
They had the brown eyes of soft-hearted dogs.
They didn’t want to do anything so extraordinary, only to fly
home to their river.
By now I suppose the great darkness has covered them.
As for myself, I am not yet a god of even the palest flowers.
Nothing else has changed either.
Someone tosses their white bones to the dung-heap.
The sun shines on the latch of their cage.
I lie in the dark, my heart pounding.
THE LILIES BREAK OPEN OVER THE DARK WATER
Inside
that mud-hive, that gas-sponge,
that reeking
leaf-yard, that rippling
dream-bowl, the leeches’
flecked and swirling
broth of life, as rich
as Babylon,
the fists crack
open and the wands
of the lilies
quicken, they rise
like pale poles
with their wrapped beaks of lace;
one day
they tear the surface,
the next they break open
over the dark water.
And there you are
on the shore,
to attach them to an idea—
some news of your own life.
But the lilies
are slippery and wild—they are
devoid of meaning, they are
simply doing,
from the deepest
spurs of their being,
what they are impelled to do
every summer.
And so, dear sorrow, are you.
DEATH AT A GREAT DISTANCE
The ripe, floating caps
of the fly amanita
glow in the pinewoods.
I don’t even think
of the eventual corruption of my body,
but of how quaint and humorous they are,
like a collection of doorknobs,
half-moons,
then a yellow drizzle of flying saucers.
In any case
they won’t hurt me unless
I take them between my lips
and swallow, which I know enough
not to do. Once, in the south,
I had this happen:
the soft rope of a watermoccasin
slid down the red knees
of a mangrove, the hundreds of ribs
housed in their smooth, white
sleeves of muscle moving it
like a happiness
toward the water, where some bubbl
es
on the surface of that underworld announced
a fatal carelessness. I didn’t
even then move toward the fine point
of the story, but stood in my lonely body
amazed and full of attention as it fell
like a stream of glowing syrup into
the dark water, as death
blurted out of that perfectly arranged mouth.
THE NOTEBOOK
“Six a.m.—
the small, pond turtle
lifts its head
into the air
like a green toe.
It looks around.
What it sees
is the whole world
swirling back from darkness:
a red sun
rising over the water,
over the pines,
and the wind lifting,
and the water-striders heading out,
and the white lilies
opening their happy bodies.
The turtle
doesn’t have a word for any of it—
the silky water
or the enormous blue morning,
or the curious affair of his own body.
On the shore
I’m so busy
scribbling and crossing out
I almost miss seeing him
paddle away
through the wet, black forest.
More and more the moments come to me:
how much can the right word do?
Now a few of the lilies
are a faint flamingo inside
their white hearts,
and there is still time
to let the last roses of the sunrise
float down
into my uplifted eyes.”
PRAISE
Knee-deep
in the ferns
springing up
at the edge of the whistling swamp,
I watch the owl
with its satisfied,
heart-shaped face
as it flies over the water—
back and forth—
as it flutters down
like a hellish moth
wherever the reeds twitch—
whenever, in the muddy cover,
some little life sighs
before it slides into the moonlight
and becomes a shadow.
In the distance,
awful and infallible,
the old swamp belches.
Of course
it stabs my heart
whenever something cries out
like a teardrop.
But isn’t it wonderful,
what is happening
in the branches of the pines:
the owl’s young,
dressed in snowflakes,
are starting to fatten—
they beat their muscular wings,
they dream of flying
for another million years
over the water,