Thousands lavishing, thousands starving
intrigues, wars, flatteries, envyings,
hypocrisies, lying vanities, hollow amusements,
exhaustion, dissipation, death—and giddiness
and laughter, from the first scene to the last.
—Samuel Palmer, 1858


I.Pan Awakes: Summer Marches In


Pan’s
spring rain
“drives his victims
out to the animals
with whom they become
as one”—


pain and paeans,
hung in the mouth,

to be sung


II. What the Flowers in the Meadow Tell Me


June 6, 1857, Thoreau in his Journal:

A year is made up of a certain series
and number of sensations and thoughts
which have their language in nature…

Now I am ice, now
I am sorrel.


Or, Clare, 1840, Epping Forest:

I found the poems in the fields
And only wrote them down

and

The book I love is everywhere
And not in idle words

John, claritas, tells us the words are not idle,
the syllables are able
to turn plantains into quatrains,
tune raceme to cyme, panicle and umbel to
form corollas in light clusters of tones…


Sam Palmer hit it:
“Milton, by one epithet
draws an oak of the largest girth I ever saw,
‘Pine and monumental oak’:
I have just been trying to draw a large one in
Lullingstone; but the poet’s tree is huger than
any in the park.”

Muse in the meadow, compose in
a mind!


III. What the Animals in the Forest Tell Me


Harris’s Sparrow—

103 species seen
by the Georgia Ornithological Society
in Rabun Gap,

including Harris’s Sparrow, with its
black crown, face, and bib encircling
a pink bill


It was, I think, the third sighting
in Georgia, and I should have been there
instead of reading Clare, listening to
catbirds and worrying about
Turdus migratorius that flew
directly into the Volkswagen and
bounced into a ditch


Friend Robin, I cannot figure it, if I’d
been going 40 you might be
whistling in some grass.

10 tepid people got 10 stale letters
one day earlier,
I cannot be happy
about that.


IV. What the Night Tells Me


the dark drones on
in the southern wheat fields
and the hop flowers
open before the sun’s
beckoning


the end
is ripeness, the wind
rises,
and the dawn says
yes


YES! it says
“yes”


V. What the Morning Bells Tells Me


Sounds, and sweet aires
that give delight
and hurt not—

that.
let
Shakespeare’s 
delectation
bear us


VI. What Love Tells Me


Anton Bruckner counts the 877th leaf
on a linden tree in the countryside near Wien
and prays:

Dear God, Sweet Jesus,
Save us, Save Us…

the Light in the Grass,
the Wind on the Hill,

are in my head,
the world cannot be heard


Leaves obliterate
my heart,

we touch each other
far apart…


Let us count
into
the Darkness