IT’S ONLY NATURAL

 

 

I

 

When nature ruled the world by terror,

                                    we were a puny race.

Small wonder we conceived the error

                                    wind bewailed our case,

            cast shepherd and shepherdess in verse and vase

                        and haunted home with fauns and talking

                        roots our footfalls set to squawking:

                        even that half-human cur,

our Caliban constrained to speak pentameter.

 

                        Just yesterday, when I was a child

                                    on the lonely road from Pitt

                        to Torr, pursuit of classics piled

                                    in the lit farmhouse kit-

            chen couldn’t charm with civilizing wit

                        the brute beyond the curtilage, past

                        sweet laurel drifted through the last

                        of our sugar trees before a vast

hardwood stretching like the question never asked.

 

                        Big cats on the abrupt hills

                                    paced the hard path;

                        From cozy walls in the hollow’s still-

                                    ness, burst the viper’s wrath.

            Old Man Fredsall sledded to town with stacks

                        of children for a graveyard roadside,

                        stood in our door til one more load died.

                        And from our house for all their days

the Seelyes met the stone-cold gaze

                        of the round pond, deeper than wide,

                        where their small son, Ethan, slipped and died;

slipped in the dark tarn and drowned in the black, black, blackness.

 

 

 

II

 

 

                        And we, the dull-eyed, vacant seed

                        scrambled away as urgently

                                    as turtles newly hatched must,

                                    beating to the sea.

                        Spring permits belief in free-

                        dom now that the roads are clear

                        and the dead can be buried.  Let us flee

                                    with automatic speed

                                    from the land that will have us:

 

                        from those who lie blinded by the land,

                        tucked under flowered quilts: from hand

                                    of Fredsall, five miles down

                                    and as many up our hill

                        over and over with all his chil-

                        dren, and never mind until

                        they were frozen logs on the ground:

 

                        from Missus Seelye’s memory,

                        who milked her cows and worked our piece

                                    until the hour she died from

                                    cancer.  Just that time,

                        for once she owned to a foolish pain

                                    and had herself a lie-down:

 

                                    from grim and graceless Ma,

                        who’d paint her thread-thin lips bright red

                        to visit the barn-yard and behead

                        a chicken on the chopping block.

 

 

 

III

 

 

                        Traveling light in the city of,

                                    by, and for

                        the people, I’d perfect blooms above

                        a concrete soil, cracked from shores

                        of finding, not the dense floors

                        of tearing thickets hung with white,

                                    appallingly lovely spiders.

 

                        “Nature can suck out the soul through an eye

                                    or an ear; stay

                        inside your head,” chirped the raptor, high

                        over quarry.  But, “Every kind will pay

                        the price of its strength,” twin fox heads say,

                        eyes bright with hate over back of pew

                                    in clever church, “J’accuse.”

 

                        The shadow of wings discerned, grim twins,

                                    foreboding and

                        remorse, recall us to our sins.

                        We’ve slaughtered all the lions and

                        their symmetry, leveled the land,

                        built over our hill and stopped the view

                                    with smut.  Places we knew

                        live on in the mind only, stand

                        like the dead stars that guide by their true

light.  I hail from the Land of Cary.  Who are you?

 

 

 

IV

 

 

            The earth we spoiled will cleanse herself and heal,

            purged of the Masterful Ape.  Too smart to feel,

too clever to say true, too able to refrain,

 

            we lose by winning.  Worship her whose reign

            only the meek inherit; leave the plain

where cranes of black gold genuflect to Mammon, steal

 

            to land’s end where the lighthouse’ metric peal

            tolls battles of the sun and moon, and kneel

where breath of cold, salt floods can quench a hectic brain

 

            and bless with sacraments withheld the strain

            of my simple, man-made girl’s possessed refrain,

her dear, demented voice singing, singing in the night.