More on: nature

Like a baker, swaddling the juice and heft of apples in pastry, I want my mouth to cradle the delicious name of God. Kissing the Torah, I breathe the dust that has lain on the name of God, imagine ink on my indrawn breath. I will dream myself into the body of a bee. I…

Thus this restless little butterfly of the memory has its wings burned now and cannot fly. —Teresa of Avila Char my wings. Lord, singe these cells of forewing, hindwing. Blacken memory’s sky blue shimmer, its thousands of cells— each startling pigment, each dorsal and ventral venation— the coppered glint of flight, oh Lord. If prayer…

Under the catastrophic dark, the comet splintering the sky with its ancient grief, under the splay-handed palms, under drinks glowering dark in globes of glass, under the tender humidity, the phosphorescent surf, under the calls of nightjars chuckling up from the ground, under the ticking aloe under the moon’s absence, under, under, under. Under the…

After Les Très Riches Heures du Duc de Berry, Illuminated manuscript, 1410-1416 Like dancers in a pirouette the mowers with their scythes, their polished rhythms whispering through harvest’s green ballet. Two women turn the tumbled hay, so slight and stockingless and lithe one could wish the world this script, no hail of brightness perishing through…

Sent from Troy, Alabama, September 1, 2005 All things fall, all things are built again…. ————(For Bill Thompson) How empty ring the petitions of the saved, Like wind notes in an afterthought of wind When the storm’s done, though the ravaged Nearby you, nearby your salvaged town, Troop like ragged pilgrims to some central dome…

Bernheim Forest Today’s forest floor, a terrazzo of copper leaf. The remaining scrub also copper: copper breath, penny breath, too faint to call it rustling. The mother trees of summer— those iron lungs—streamed oxygen from paps that swayed sweet rock-a-byes in green blouses. But now all is brittle air. Underfoot snap and crack. And all…

Cape Breton Facing the east was the cliff dropping sixty feet to the sea: a rock- face frozen in the slow-motion act of falling. A shirred schist. A Parkinson’s of stone—sheer and delicate as a chiton carved by a Greek. Sweeping back from the cliff, a slope of steep green. Empty but for a spattering…

Mornings their garden greens and flowers, tomatoes ripen fat as babies’ bellies, hollyhocks tower straight-laced as fence rails. This is not the black-topped yard of her childhood, weedless, grassless, without tree bark or squirrel. Here she follows behind her husband’s wild planting. Where Adam has sown, she is Eve weeding, creating order and the simplicity…

So little is legible: glacial till, the moonlight on an iced-over ditch, The moon itself—an opal pruning hook. He could go on like this: list after list, A compendium apropos of nothing more than to place the speaker here, Pointing north, bewitched like a compass needle. Hard to make much that resembles poetry out of…

The death of one god is the death of all. —Wallace Stevens When you left it was as if a glacier retreated, As if the ice tonnage, which rasped, scraped, and scoured for ages, Diminished in a moon’s single phase to a trickle of meltwater. I live in the aftermath—till, eskers, erratics, cirques, exposed bedrock.…