This Compost: Ecological Imperatives in American Poetry

Milk light

100 T H I S C O M P O S T Life I am knowing All about Unfolding Milk light The stars point to an articulate order surpassing language, evolving a realm in which art is not construction, artifice, meticulous relationship to a space and a -world existing outside it is truly the 'inarticulate cry' as Hermes Trismegistus said, '-which seemed to be the sound of the light' These stars are fragrant and I follow their scent. I am their hunting hound, predator of the marvelous. In the region of the inarticulate cry, where all sensations reduce to blank dazzle, "Life is an ecstasy. Life is sweet as nitrous oxide," Emerson writes ("Illusions").* "Thus events grow on the same stem with persons; are sub-persons. The pleasure of life is according to the man that lives it.... Life is an ecstasy" ("Fate"). "We are extrusions, facets, auras, in vibratory flowing surge of infinite possibilities," McClure barksin unison with his animal cohorts in "WolfNet" (Scratching theBeat Surface, 160). And "A ribosome in a liver cell in a salmon might relate to a field of * William James has interesting things to say about nitrous oxide in The Will to Believe ("On Some Hegelisms"): "It is impossible to convey an idea ofthe torrential character of the identification ofopposites asit streams through the mind in this experience," he writes(677). Noting that the propensity of gaseous intoxication wasindubitably Hegelian, he offers asan example of the "most coherent and articulate sentence" he produced under the influence: "There are no differences but differences of degree between different degrees of difference and no difference" (678). M I L K L I G H T IOI energies or a point within a quasar or a distant sun" (126). "Ourexperience of the universe is also the universe perceiving itself" (127)—the same bifold self/other inspection, the fertile sundering of a universe that has to slice itself in two to observe itself (according to Spencer Brown in Lams of form). In the wisdom of the ancients, the stars were mirroring provocateurs of human affairs. To look up wasto gaze inward and see the milk ofthe stars become the maternal plangency of galaxy's gala—its milky blast, its nourishing forecast of fate's influx in animal blessing; the inimitable span and paradox of poetry that "love isnot made caressinglyfrom pore topore, butfrom pore to star" (Lezama Lima, 175). Sex on earth is rhymed angelic motion. Outer space and inner space misnomers when what is meant (nomen, numen) is rhymed in megalith and microspore But the solar heart defines the blood How far out you go it is within.* As, even for the infant in utero, "pressing a knee or elbow / along a slippery wall, sculpting / the world with each thrash"—even there in that sanctuary—"the stream of omphalos blood [is]humming all about you." In the plush grace of the womb, every heartbeat resounds, as "The sweet virile hair of thunder storms / Brushes over the swelling horizon." Stars and storms are respirations: before us gods goddesses at the ends of words dead and alive among apple trees in the old orchard the sky is first an inhalation, then smaller and tinted, an exhalation — and the words are not winds but small movements, ruled in a largeness that is not ourselves 'John Muir notes in a journal: "I only went out for a walk, and finally concluded to stay out till sundown, for going out,I found, was really going in" (Slovic, 351). 102 T H I S C O M P O S T A transparent base shuddering. .. under and through the universe rides the brows of the sounding whales & swells in the thousand cow-bells. It undulates under each meadow to thunder in the hills, the crow's call, & the apple-falls. I hear it always,in a huge & earthy fugue, from inner ear, to farthest owls The ringing in your ears is the cricket in the stars. The reckoning of selfhood in the span of planets and stars is not instantaneous, but a labor oftime: "the distance between the star and its subjectare complemented by the antiquity of the light which finally arrives" (Kuberski, 77).The legendary music of the spheres is the sound of that arrival, a gratified constellation attuned in audible delight, in musical realization. Freedom. It isn't once, to walk out under the Milky Way, feeling the rivers of light...