Nature

August long ago, the summer Lemnian
(not like the deeds of those who killed their men),
the self a glowing bead, like Hephaestus falling
daylong out of heaven in the old story,
the island's interior a forge, a glory hole,
the odor of wild thyme borne offshore steadily,
the Aegean Sea purple, wine-dark, without epithet;
and as I walked on the beach, my mother not long dead,
the perfect crystal of my self-regard
so lately flawed, and landscape made to echo
my own low cry in the island's empty places,

This is Tarsus, one place like anyplace else.
And this is my circuit, the rodeo, fair.
The farmboys blow through here in pickups, wild
as horses in their oat sacks.
The women wear spurs.
In the trailers the cattle are pounding for air.

Mauve mist-shadow cloaks the sky’ s
River-blurred, inchoate border.
Dawn’ s old story; and light tries —
Not the last time — to devise
Lasting order;

From first principles assigns
Laws to frame day’ s jurisdiction;
Drawing contours, shapes, and lines
From the nebula, it shines,
Strange as fiction.

It hangs on its
stem like a plum
at the edge of a
darkening thicket.

It’ s swelling and
blushing and ripe
and I reach out a
hand to pick it

Dormant are pinnacles and streams of the mountains,
Chasms and bluffs and crawlers fed by the dark earth;
Dormant are wild animals and that tribe of bees
And monsters out of the sea’ s dark syntax;
Dormant are clans of birds with wings that envelop.

I

I hear you are whispering there O stars of heaven,
O suns — O grass of graves...
If you do not say anything how can I say anything?

Let us tunnel

the air
(as a mole’ s green galleries)
toward the ultimate

cornfield
— the square of gold, & green, & of tassle

that rustles back at us —

let us burrow in
to a susurration, the dense starlings,

of the real —
the huge
sunflowers waving back at us,

as we move

— the great grassy world

that surrounds us,
singing.

1

In the Forest of    Wearisome Sadness,
Where one day I found myself wandering alone,
I met my heart, who called to me, asking me where I was going.

The path was long and straight, row after row of conifers receding
To a horizon that because of   the geometry
Seemed farther than it really was,
Like the door at the top of a staircase in Versailles.

But as if   the forest’ s maker had been offended by elegance,
A pile of rocks disrupted the rows: the forest once
Had been a field. I remember that field.

This sunlight on snow.

This decrescendo
of covered stumps & brush —
stop for it.

Stop before the sled end-
over-ends down
the chin of the hill —

the way it always will
at the rock ⅔ of the way down.

Stop & shiver in it: the ring
of snow inside gloves,
the cusp of red forehead

like a sun just waiting to top
the hill. Every ill-built

Every tripod-
toting birder
knows it never
nests on urban

girders. Even
fences set its
scalded-crimson
head askew, its

waddle swinging,
wings akimbo.
Few have got it
on their lists and

fewer still have
caught it singing,
this endangered
North American

candor, cousin
of the done-in
dodo, big-eyed
Big Sur tremor-

tenor — only
ten or twenty
hang glide over
Modoc County,

You have a strange pet —
one eye is a cat’ s, the other a sheep’ s.
Yet, it won’ t socialize with felines,
will attack any flock.
On moonlit nights,
it wanders on the roof.

When you’ re alone
it will lie in your lap
preoccupied, slowly studying you
until — on its face — a challenge.

Translated from the Chinese