Animals and Nature

I was a stricken deer, that left the herd

I lingered round them, under that benign sky: watched the moths fluttering among the heath and hare-bells; listened to the soft wind breathing through the grass; and wondered how any one could ever imagine unquiet slumbers for the sleepers in that quiet earth.

 

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

Everything is good as it leaves the hands of the Author of things; everything degenerates in the hands of man. He forces one soil to nourish the products of another, one tree to bear the fruit of another. He mixes and confuses the climates, the elements, the seasons. He mutilates his dog, his horse, his slave. He turns everything upside down; he disfigures everything; he loves deformity, monsters. He wants nothing as nature made it, not even man; for him, man must be trained like a school horse; man must be fashioned in keeping with his fancy like a tree in his garden.

The living self has one purpose only: to come into its own fullness of being, as a tree comes into full blossom, or a bird into spring beauty, or a tiger into luster.

The bird of paradise alights only upon the hand that does not grasp.

Adapt or perish, now as ever, is Nature’s inexorable imperative.

The imagination is man’s power over nature.

Out of the cradle endlessly rocking,

Don’t you find it a beautiful clean thought, a world empty of people, just uninterrupted grass, and a hare sitting up?

 

Learn of the green world what can be thy place

The President ordains the bee to be Immortal.

i speak for none of you now, all you plotters of perfect crimes, nor for me, nor for anyone. i speak for those who can’t speak, for the deaf and dumb witnesses, for otters and seals, for the ancient owls of the earth.

[On the nightingale:] Lord Zeus, listen to the little bird’s voice; he has filled the whole thicket with honeyed song.

Old age is a flight of small cheeping birds skimming bare trees above a snow glaze.

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.

It did not give of bird or bush,

I placed a jar in Tennessee,

The water never formed to mind or voice,

Up from the bronze, I saw Water without a flaw Rush to its rest in air, Reach to its rest, and fall.

Green, how much I want you green. Green wind. Green branches. The ship upon the sea and the horse in the mountain.

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.

The ant’s a centaur in his dragon world.

… With a sudden sharp hot stink of fox,