Poetry & Nature

On my way to the fertility clinic,
         I pass five dead animals.

First a raccoon with all four paws…

It's a rush, a sploosh of sewage, twenty thousand cubic metres being pumped in, stirred and settled …

The city lies back in its winding-sheet
While little digits drum a steady beat

On roofs and terraces, …

*
clouds creak in the sky
herons creak in the sky. 
*
the dark approaches itself
from all sides once again…

Water minus air becomes wound.
Her blowhole, bursts of breathing,
trapped in an endless curtain of netting…

Morning thick with inscrutable dinge;
another season drained. I’m watching
the pest control man fill the rat bait
station, black attaché of poison hidden
in the hedge.
                And while I pay a monthly
bill for him to do my killing, still
it seems miraculous, how much insists
on...

O transient voyager of heaven!
⁠ ⁠ ⁠ O silent sign of winter skies!
What adverse wind thy sail has driven
⁠ ⁠ ⁠ To dungeons where a prisoner lies?

Methinks the hands that shut the sun
⁠ ⁠ ⁠ ⁠So sternly from this morning's brow
Might still their rebel task have done
⁠⁠ ⁠ ⁠ And checked a thing...

I am no shepherd of a child’s surmises.
I have seen fear where the coiled serpent rises,

Thirst where the grasses burn in early May
And thistle, mustard, and the wild oat stay.

There is dust in this air. I saw in the heat
Grasshoppers...

200 cows         more than 600 hilly acres

            property would have been even larger
had J not sold 66 acres to DuPont for
                waste from its Washington Works factory
where J was employed        
       ...

the wing of the sea is the wave;
the wave of the sky is the rain;
the salt of the rain falls as hail;
and the hail of hate rains in shots;

the shot of the soul is the bell;
bell without time is the...

It is so goddamn hot in our country that blooms
                                        —jacarandas, bougainvilleas, flamboyants—
erupt in a shock of fuchsia from pipes laced with rust.
Hokoyo! Step too close and your skin will crisp up like a chicken in hot Olivine.
                                        Everyone will...

I
Among twenty snowy mountains,   
The only moving thing   
Was the eye of the blackbird.   

II
I was of three minds,   
Like a tree   
In which there are three blackbirds.   

III
The blackbird whirled in the autumn winds.   
It was a small part of the pantomime.   

IV
A man and a woman   
Are...

Farmhouses curl like horns of plenty, hide   
scrawny bare shanks against a barn, or crouch   
empty in the shadow of a mountain. Here   
there is no house at all—

only the bones of a house,
lilacs growing beside them,
roses in clumps between them,   
honeysuckle over;
a gap...

Think of the storm roaming the sky uneasily
like a dog looking for a place to sleep in,
listen to it growling.

Think how they must look now, the mangrove keys
lying out there unresponsive to the lightning
in dark, coarse-fibred families,

where occasionally a heron...

Once I believed in you; I planted a fig tree.
Here, in Vermont, country
of no summer. It was a test: if the tree lived,
it would mean you existed.

By this logic, you do not exist. Or you exist
exclusively in warmer climates,
in fervent...