Nature

Someone’ s coming
from the other world.

Hiss of night rain.

Someone’ s going there now.
The two are sure to meet.

Translated from the Korean

Twenty-four thousand times in any year, lightning strikes
and kills. On the Heath, the timber shells, like bony Flemish spires,
point heavenwards in warning. The stags take note and bow their heads
at the sky’ s first challenge, or hurl a bellowing peal back in defiance.

The truck grinds by
and pumps out grit;
the road glints and
goes still.

The barn owl that
had not finished here
returns. But with
its fill

of scavenges,
face ruffled in mulch,
the vole is lost
and safe

so the silent specter
flits away, its
moon face to
the moon

and rears unknown
against a copse,
claws tipped for
the strafe

and something dies
too soon.

He filled her between
the hay bales in
that Dutch barn, now
abandoned,

I

here I’ m here I’ m here I’ m

here here here here cricket

pulse — the katydidic tick

(and then a pause) tick

(and then a pause) in greening trees — tales

of a gratitude for water, the hollyhock’ s

trumpet Yes, Tenderness

her glove and hoe — her bad trip

love/grief, her medic tent

talking me down, kissed fissures

in the world’ s despair, what I’ d

loved — alive for a while — a day called

Rip and Brood, a day called

Glorious Hour, the long hunt and the worm found

I spit my smack,

Jim slugs his Jack,

Rob stews his lack,

Carey prepares his rack,

herons hunker on blowdowns,

deer wait on high moon for their rounds,

and the campfire

might as well be an empire

we all

watch dissolve

(in the slough, a carp roll, a splash)

into ash.

I like to lie with you wordless
on black cloud rooft beach
in late june 5 o’ clock tempest
on clump weed bed with sand
fitting your contours like tailor made

and I like to wash my summer brown face
in north cold hudson rapids
with octagon soap
knees niched in steamy rocks
where last night’ s frog stared
at our buddhist sleep

but most of all I like to see
the morning happen...

Leave it to the street vendors
of NYC to improvise a shrine
from whatever they find,

setting a place at their table
for animal and divine nature
symbolically joined with
color-coded floral candelabras.

Don't be misled:
that sea-song you hear
when the shell's at your ear?
It's all in your head.

That primordial tide —
the slurp and salt-slosh
of the brain's briny wash —
is on the inside.

Truth be told, the whole place,
everything that the eye
can take in, to the sky
and beyond into space,

lives inside of your skull.
When you set your sad head
down on Procrustes' bed,
you lay down the whole

a woman moves through dog rose and juniper bushes,
a pussy clean and folded between her legs,
breasts like the tips of her festive shoes
shine silently in her heavy armoire.

one blackbird, one cow, one horse.
the sea beats against the wall of the waterless.
she walks to a phone booth that waits
a fair distance from all three villages.

it’ s a game she could have heard on the radio:
a question, a number, an answer, a prize.
her pussy reaches up and turns on the light in her womb.

1

The long incision. The incipient voyage from aortic arch to thoracic inlet. Small-particled is the corpuscled city. (Bustling opuscula.) A city of animal electricity. A lowing cycling mass. Calm the cowed heart. Still the browbeating heart. Cool the controversial hearthstone. Let the blade intervene where the divine intersects bovinity.

2