To drive to it’s to drive via it.
Like a stalker, it’s within the again seat of the automobile.
It’s within the passenger seat, and the wires of the radio.
You need to consider it as a vacation spot,
a two-week break from buy energy.
Although you’ve bought a lot to get there.
Sure sneakers, with sure soles.
Like an exile in a self-made skiff
in the midst of a tortured sea, nature
is what you’ve completed to it.
Nature is you, and the doing to it,
and your platitudes, and the wishing
you could possibly do extra, or might have completed extra.
May have completed—part of speech known as
a “modal of misplaced alternatives.” Nature
is the components of speech, having realized them,
and having forgotten them. It’s the singular
pronoun you wanting within the mirror,
realizing you could possibly have completed extra to carry on
to your magnificence. Who’re you kidding?
You had been by no means lovely. There was nothing
to carry on to. Nature is the way you had been born,
with a birthmark that blazed whenever you cried,
centered proper between your brows
like a bull’s-eye. There was a time, you need to say.
You fed apples to horses via barbed-wire
fences. You slept for nights on finish
in a fishing shack constructed on a pier within the center
of a pond deeper than anybody might calculate.
You knew the place the morels grew,
and the watercress, which you pulled and ate
with out embellishment. What did it style like?
It tasted inexperienced. Nature is that this type of nostalgia.
It’s human nature. The way you parse and equivocate,
your selective reminiscence. The lean of your sentences.
With out habitat, nature encroaches, stripping
the pods from backyard peas within the suburbs.
In case you have the heart to stroll at 3 a.m. you will notice
entire antlered herds underneath the celebrities, chewing
and peeing on the identical time, and watch
the pee steam within the induction mild of road lamps.
Foxes hurry down sidewalks
as if they’re late for a gathering, counting
their steps, a quantity that may legitimize
their presence on the planet. No surprise
their smiles are self-satisfied. Rabbits leap
in patterns throughout boulevards named after bushes.
There’s something in suburban rabbits
that has developed towards wickedness,
their tails like an implement developed
for hospitals, to mop up blood.
Nature can’t be redeemed. It’s your want
to redeem it, to set issues proper.
It’s the impossibility of redemption.
It’s the lover strolling out, their self-justified gait
as they disappear via the tunnel of flowers.
This poem has been excerpted from the gathering You Are Right here, edited by Ada Limón.
