Nature and Elements

I am the magical mouse I don’t eat cheese I eat sunsets And the tops of trees.

I’d have nightmares of other islands stretching away from mine, infinities of islands, islands spawning islands like frogs’ eggs turning into polliwogs of islands, knowing that I had to live on each and every one, eventually, for ages, registering their flora, their fauna, their geography.

His beak is focussed; he is preoccupied, looking for something, something, something. Poor bird, he is obsessed! The millions of grains are black, white, tan, and gray, mixed with quartz grains, rose and amethyst.

Time to plant tears, says the almanac. The grandmother sings to the marvelous stove and the child draws another inscrutable house.

It is like what we imagine knowledge to be: dark, salt, clear, moving, utterly free, drawn from the cold hard mouth of the world, derived from the rocky breasts forever, flowing and drawn, and since our knowledge is historical, flowing, and flown.

Cold dark deep and absolutely clear, element bearable to no mortal, to fish and to seals…

Until everything was rainbow, rainbow, rainbow! And I let the fish go.

Now I adore my life With the Bird, the abiding Leaf, With the Fish, the questing Snail, And the Eye altering all; And I dance with William Blake For love, for Love’s sake.

What I love is near at hand, Always, in earth and air.

I see, in evening air, How slowly dark comes down on what we do.

When I was a lark, I sang; When I was a worm, I devoured.

And the new plants, still awkward in their soil, The lovely diminutives. I could watch! I could watch! I saw the separateness of all things!

I study the lives on a leaf: the little Sleepers, numb nudgers in cold dimensions, Beetles in caves, newts, stone-deaf fishes, Lice tethered to long limp subterranean weeds, Squirmers in bogs, And bacterial creepers.

Nothing would give up life: Even the dirt kept breathing a small breath.

The girls are all giggling, then one girl suddenly remembers the wild goat. Up there, on the hilltop, in the woods and rocky ravines, the peasants saw him butting his head against the trees, looking for the nannies. He’s gone wild, and the reason why is this: if you don’t make an animal work, if you keep him only for stud, he likes to hurt, he kills.

Come up with me, American love. Kiss these secret stones with me. The torrential silver of the Urubamba makes the pollen fly to its golden cup. The hollow of the bindweed’s maze, the petrified plant, the inflexible garland, soar above the silence of these mountain coffers.

The trouble with a kitten is THAT Eventually it becomes a CAT.

I think that I shall never see A billboard lovely as a tree. Indeed, unless the billboards fall I’ll never see a tree at all. 1

The turtle lives ’twixt plated decks Which practically conceal its sex. I think it clever of the turtle In such a fix to be so fertile.

Rest at pale evening… A tall slim tree… Night coming tenderly Black like me.

I’ll see you again, Whenever spring breaks through again.

Patio, heaven’s watercourse. The patio is the slope down which the sky flows into the house. Serenely eternity waits at the crossway of the stars.

The New York dawn has four columns of mud and a hurricane of black doves that paddle in putrescent waters.

Black are the horses. The horseshoes are black. On the dark capes glisten stains of ink and of wax. Their skulls are leaden, which is why they don’t weep. With their patent leather souls they come down the street.