over the ferns,
over the world’s roughage
as it bleeds and deepens.
LOOKING FOR SNAKES
Because it is good
to be afraid—
but not too afraid—
I walk carefully
up the slabby hill,
through laces of bracken,
through the thick, wild roses,
waiting for my heart
to fly up
out of the leaves
chilled
and singing,
and it does.
They’re there—
two of them,
in sleepy loops—
and they rise
in a spit of energy,
like dark stalks.
among the wild, pink roses,
their mouths
narrow and stubborn,
their red eyes
staring.
Do you shiver
at the mere mention
of their glossy,
shoulderless bodies?
I would like to bring you here.
I would like you to remember
the black flowers of their faces
as well as their quick slithering—
I would like you to remember
the pretty fire that dabs out of their mouths
as well as the plunge back into the shadows,
and the heart’s thudding song.
FISH BONES
Maybe Michelangelo
or Picasso
could have imagined
these dream shapes,
these curves and thongs,
snow-needles,
jaws, brain-cases,
eye sockets—
somebody, anyway,
whose mind
was in some clear kind
of rapture
and probably
in the early morning
when the sun
on its invisible muscle
was rising
over the water.
I don’t think
it was just a floundering
in the darkness,
no matter
how much time there was.
This morning
I picked up something
like a honey-combed heart,
and something else
like a frozen flower
at the foot of the waves
and I thought of da Vinci—
the way he kept dreaming
of what was inside the darkness—
how it wanted to rise
on its invisible muscle,
how it wanted to shine
like fire.
THE OAK TREE AT THE ENTRANCE TO BLACKWATER POND
Every day
on my way to the pond
I pass the lightning-felled,
chesty,
hundred-fingered, black oak
which, summers ago,
swam forward when the storm
laid one lean yellow wand against it, smoking it open
to its rosy heart.
It dropped down
in a veil of rain,
in a cloud of sap and fire,
and became what it has been ever since—
a black boat
floating
in the tossing leaves of summer,
like the coffin of Osiris
descending
upon the cloudy Nile.
But, listen, I’m tired of that brazen promise:
death and resurrection.
I’m tired of hearing how the nitrogens will return
to the earth again,
through the hinterland of patience—
how the mushrooms and the yeasts
will arrive in the wind—
how they’ll anchor the pearls of their bodies and begin
to gnaw through the darkness,
like wolves at bones—
what I loved, I mean, was that tree—
tree of the moment—tree of my own sad, mortal heart—
and I don’t want to sing anymore of the way
Osiris came home at last, on a clean
and powerful ship, over
the dangerous sea, as a tall
and beautiful stranger.
EVERYTHING
No doubt in Holland,
when van Gogh was a boy,
there were swans drifting
over the green sea
of the meadows, and no doubt
on some warm afternoon
he lay down and watched them,
and almost thought: this is everything.
What drove him
to get up and look further
is what saves this world,
even as it breaks
the hearts of men.
In the mines where he preached,
where he studied tenderness,
there were only men, all of them
streaked with dust.
For years he would reach
toward the darkness.
But no doubt, like all of us,
he finally remembered
everything, including the white birds,
weightless and unaccountable,
floating around the towns
of grit and hopelessness—
and this is what would finish him:
not the gloom, which was only terrible,
but those last yellow fields, where clearly
nothing in the world mattered, or ever would,
but the insensible light.
NATURE
All night
in and out the slippery shadows
the owl hunted,
the beads of blood
scarcely dry on the hooked beak before
hunger again seized him
and he fell, snipping
the life from some plush breather,
and floated away
into the crooked branches
of the trees, that all night
went on lapping
the sunken rain, and growing,
bristling life
spreading through all their branches
as one by one
they tossed the white moon upward
on its slow way
to another morning
in which nothing new
would ever happen,
which is the true gift of nature,
which is the reason
we love it.
Forgive me.
For hours I had tried to sleep
and failed;
restless and wild,
I could settle on nothing
and fell, in envy
of the things of darkness
following their sleepy course—
the root and branch, the bloodied beak—
even the screams from the cold leaves
were as red songs that rose and fell
in their accustomed place.
SNAKE
And here is the serpent again,
dragging himself out from his nest of darkness,
his cave under the black rocks,
his winter-death.
He slides over the pine needles.
He loops around the bunches of rising grass,
looking for the sun.
Well, who doesn’t want the sun after the long winter?
I step aside,
he feels the air with his soft tongue,
around the bones of his body he moves like oil,
downhill he goes
toward the black mirrors of the pond.
Last night it was still so cold
I woke and went out to stand in the yard,
and there was no moon.
So I just stood there, inside the jaw of nothing.
An owl cried in the distance,
I thought of Jesus, how he
crouched in the dark for two nights,
then floated back above t
he horizon.
There are so many stories,
more beautiful than answers.
I follow the snake down to the pond,
thick and musky he is
as circular as hope.
THE PONDS
Every year
the lilies
are so perfect
I can hardly believe
their lapped light crowding
the black,
mid-summer ponds.
Nobody could count all of them—
the muskrats swimming
among the pads and the grasses
can reach out
their muscular arms and touch
only so many, they are that
rife and wild.
But what in this world
is perfect?
I bend closer and see
how this one is clearly lopsided—
and that one wears an orange blight—
and this one is a glossy cheek
half nibbled away—
and that one is a slumped purse
full of its own
unstoppable decay.
Still, what I want in my life
is to be willing
to be dazzled—
to cast aside the weight of facts
and maybe even
to float a little
above this difficult world.
I want to believe I am looking
into the white fire of a great mystery.
I want to believe that the imperfections are nothing—
that the light is everything—that it is more than the sum
of each flawed blossom rising and fading. And I do.
THE SUMMER DAY
Who made the world?
Who made the swan, and the black bear?
Who made the grasshopper?
This grasshopper, I mean—
the one who has flung herself out of the grass,
the one who is eating sugar out of my hand,
who is moving her jaws back and forth instead of up and down—
who is gazing around with her enormous and complicated eyes.
Now she lifts her pale forearms and thoroughly washes her face.
Now she snaps her wings open, and floats away.
I don’t know exactly what a prayer is.
I do know how to pay attention, how to fall down
into the grass, how to kneel down in the grass,
how to be idle and blessed, how to stroll through the fields,
which is what I have been doing all day.
Tell me, what else should I have done?
Doesn’t everything die at last, and too soon?
Tell me, what is it you plan to do
with your one wild and precious life?
SERENGETI
When he comes,
walking under the baobab,
awash with the sun, or flecked
with patches of shadows—
his curled lip, under the long hair
as rough as a crib of hay,
dappled with black flies—
when he comes,
at night, floating along the edges
of the waterholes—
when he snuffles the ground, and opens
the wet tunnel of his throat, and roars—
I think of the heavy-browed, crouched fishermen
how they stood at dusk
at the rim of the cave and listened
until it came to them
for the first time—
the terror and the awe
of the swinging, golden foot
that waits in the darkness.
Can anyone doubt that the lion of Serengeti
is part of the idea of God?
Can anyone doubt that, for those first, almost-upright bodies
in the shadow of Kilimanjaro,
in the lush garden of Africa,
in the continuation of everything beyond each individual thing,
the lion
was both the flower of life and the winch of death—
the bone-breaker,
and the agent of transformation?
No doubt, in the beginning,
he rose out of the grass
like a fire—
as now he rises out of the grass,
like a fire,
gleaming and unapproachable,
and notices me,
and fixes me with his large,
almost fatherly eyes,
and flexes his shoulders.
I don’t know
anything so beautiful as the sunlight
in his rough hair.
I don’t know
where I have seen such power before—
except perhaps in the chapel
where Michelangelo’s God,
tawny and muscular,
tears the land from the firmament
and places the sun in the sky
so that we may live
on the earth,
among the amazements,
and the lion
runs softly through the dust,
and his eyes, under the thick, animal lashes,
are almost tender,
and I don’t know when I have been
so frightened,
or so happy.
THE TERNS
The birds shrug off
the slant air,
they plunge into the sea
and vanish
under the glassy edges
of the water,
and then come back,
flying out of the waves,
as white as snow,
shaking themselves,
shaking the little silver fish,
crying out
in their own language,
voices like rough bells—
it’s wonderful
and it happens whenever
the tide starts its gushing
journey back, every morning
or afternoon.
This is a poem
about death,
about the heart blanching
in its fold of shadows
because it knows
someday it will be
the fish and the wave
and no longer itself—
it will be those white wings,
flying in and out
of the darkness
this is a poem about loving
the world and everything in it:
the self, the perpetual muscle,
the passage in and out, the bristling
swing of the sea.
ROSES, LATE SUMMER
What happens
to the leaves after
they turn red and golden and fall
away? What happens
to the singing birds
when they can’t sing
any longer? What happens
to their quick wings?
Do you think there is any
personal heaven
for any of us?
Do you think anyone,
the other side of that darkness,
will call to us, meaning us?
Beyond the trees
the foxes keep teaching their children
to live in the valley.
so they never seem to vanish, they are always there
in the blossom of light
that stands up every morning
in the dark sky.
And over one more set of hills,
along the sea,
the last roses have opened their factories of sweetness
and are giving it back to the world.
If I had another life
I would want to spend it all on some
unstinting happiness.
I would be a fox, or a tree
full of waving branches.
I wouldn’t mind being a rose
in a field full of roses.
Fear ha
s not yet occurred to them, nor ambition.
Reason they have not yet thought of.
Neither do they ask how long they must be roses, and then what.
Or any other foolish question.
HERONS IN WINTER IN THE FROZEN MARSH
All winter
two blue herons
hunkered in the frozen marsh,
like two columns of blue smoke.
What they ate
I can’t imagine,
unless it was the small laces
of snow that settled
in the ruckus of the cattails,
or the glazed windows of ice
under the tired
pitchforks of their feet—
so the answer is
they ate nothing,
and nothing good could come of that.
They were mired in nature, and starving.
Still, every morning
they shrugged the rime from their shoulders,
and all day they
stood to attention
in the stubbled desolation.
I was filled with admiration,
sympathy,
and, of course, empathy.
It called for a miracle.
Finally the marsh softened,
and their wings cranked open
revealing the old blue light,
so that I thought: how could this possibly be
the blunt, dark finish?
First one, then the other, vanished
into the ditches and upheavals.
All spring, I watched the rising blue-green grass,
above its gleaming and substantial shadows,
toss in the breeze,
like wings.
LOOKING AT A BOOK OF VAN GOGH’S PAINTINGS, IN LEWISBURG, PENNSYLVANIA
Don’t try
to tell me
what can or can’t
be done. The snow
is falling again,
perfectly at leisure
over the gray,
thin-haired backs
of the mountains of Pennsylvania.
I’m far from home.
And neither are these trees—
olives and almonds—
home; neither is this
gathering
of sunflowers,
this yellow house,
home. Don’t try to tell me
what one poor
and lonely Dutchman
can or can’t do
with a brush
and a roll of canvas
and his crazy old heart.
Outside,
the snow floats down,
it sifts through the crooked branches,
it doesn’t hesitate,
it settles over the ground
like the white fire
it was in the beginning,
wherever it began
to pour through the black sky—
what a light it becomes
anywhere at all
it rubs against this earth—
this crazy old home.