You Are Here: Poetry in the Natural World

by Ada Limon

As I stared at the trail map, I saw the friendly little red arrow that pointed to where I was on the map, its caption: You Are Here. It seemed not only to serve as a locator, but as a reminder that I was living right now, breathing in the woods, that there was life around me, that the natural world was right here and I was a part of it; I was nature too.

We are here, together in this moment, crucial and urgent, yes, but also full of wonder and awe at every turn.

If in order to have one tree flourish, we must plant more around it, the same must go for poems.

there is more time to plant trees, to write poems, to not just be in wonder at this planet, but to offer something back to it, to offer something back together. Because nature is not a place to visit. Nature is who we are.

Your shadow will outlive my father. That’s kind of comforting. Ghost-faced bats pollinate your dog-eared flowers which smell like wet rope, melon. The sky is a century with no windows. I say things like that. Sorry.

You have more rights than the undocumented: I need a permit to uproot you.

in the middle of a tortured sea, nature is what you have done to it. Nature is you, and the doing to it, and your platitudes, and the wishing you could do more, or could have done more.

You were never beautiful. There was nothing to hold on to. Nature is how you were born, with a birthmark that blazed when you cried centered right between your brows like a bullseye. There was a time, you want to say.

Nature cannot be redeemed. It is your wish to redeem it, to set things right. It is the impossibility of redemption. It is the lover walking out, their self-justified gait as they disappear through the tunnel of flowers.

A bald eagle called out to another as magpies attacked their nest. Someone called it romantic. I believed her.

The distance between my life and myself had become too far. Because of my desire to find a way out of my life.

In Alaska, my life was with me again, attached for now. I took photos of the birds to remind myself that the unsettled feeling wasn’t caused by me, and could be solved by traveling somewhere cold.

In the forest, grief lives a new life as devotion. Early August leaves play at color before surrendering to both man-made ground and messy slopes collecting undergrowth. I wonder what’s past resistance to change, on the other side of fear. If I don’t look down, or walk away. Step over the snake instead, realize both living and dying require giving up.

i turn to the trees for relief & they say nah! don’t look at us. you don’t even know our names. you don’t even know the difference between an oak tree & a maple tree. it’s true: my relationship with (love) (nature) (money) (fill in the blank) is like my relationship to weather— i only see it when it’s pouring on my head. i’m sorry to the trees i grew up with.

i didn’t ask. i never learned. or even wondered (about their names). (their families) (their longings) i only dreamed of (me)

I felt like I was climbing up those fungal discs toward something endless, beyond my birth and death, into my here-ness and now-ness, the scent and silence overwhelming me, seeping back into my pores. You had to have been there to know such joy, fear intermingled, my limbs tingling: ancient, mute.

small steps, like prayers— each one a hope exhaled into the trees. please, let me enter. please, let me leave whole.

what else can i call my footsteps forward, small, small, sure?

What’s the point, now, of crying, when you’ve cried already, he said, as if he’d never thought, or been told— and perhaps he hadn’t— Write down something that doesn’t have to matter, that still matters, to you.

I won’t be here when the worst of what’s coming comes. I think about it and then I try not to think about it. And then I try to think because if we don’t—but I can hardly grasp it. I mean her in it. The tiny glint of her voice. Something starts to collapse.

I respect the patience of heartbreak how it waits through the sweetness through the familiar beauty & then reveals itself through what doesn’t return or never arrives at all & it is only you & a series of blinking memories the moments you had once & believed

And sounds: a blurring of bees in the air no longer heard in the wild. Everything at once, she had said. All that you remember must be written down. Bed linens sailing the wind, curtains flaring beyond the windscreens, lilacs soon to lie on the ground.

There was a quickening in the heart whenever I saw him standing in a field of bloom and hum then suddenly not there.

Wash your mother’s clothes one last time and put them away— like wrapping a scoop of snow in tissue paper.

I have finally had the courage to tell him what the sky said to me all those years ago. That I am bound to its bloodline, though I can never know its true body. That I am, in essence, a peacock. Neither native nor foreign, just an iridescence doing what nature demands. “What a bunch of baloney,” I hear him say with his signature humor, like a splash of grenadine, as the sun pours its gold silt throughout the valley.

A place I love is about to disappear. When the summer sunset drives into the west side of our house, burning with a heat we’ve been warned about,

Earlier today, I tried my arms around the tree but they wouldn’t wrap all the way around and, actually, the tree scratched my skin, and tomorrow a crew will cut it down. Some people call a hackberry a junk tree or trash tree, throwing shade. I love the tree’s shade, and now it will be gone, as well as the sunlight in the shape of love, and the evil spirits will do as they please with our nights.

is this a cage? she ask me at the edge. it is a cage, I tell her, lifting my mouth from the grass. who put us here?

Because I was terrified, I learned nothing.

Would you call it a wound, I asked a doctor because there are hurts that mean so little.

Always is not a word we are allowed to use anymore about anything in the world.

What purpose, otherwise, is grief? Otherwise why watch this tree wither to ground, why follow it to its final abandonment?

The tree inside me grows. I hold its thousand tongues, thousand fires alight. They will never burn you, no— though no one will ever put them out.

My son forgot he could not swim, then emerged tall as laughter, hidden as the lesson in a song. He forgot how to tie his shoes then learned how to draw a face and tie it to a string and run far off into the place only he could go. I chased him but he just grew larger. For a week he became a carpenter, hammering filled my heart. My heart went to the hardware store and bought all the napping spatulas.

Each day was that same sweet holiday that never ended until the windows got soft. It was summer.

During this summer of hospice, my love, where we don’t know if we have days, weeks, or months, we escape just an hour away to Laguna Niguel whose beaches are a summer salve: an upper limb of the sun dubbing a hue that evades the duress of our current reality. I must try and see the whole of what’s in front of me without squandering it.

A monarch flutters through as the rain begins its light fall Why shouldn’t the rain signal regret

The day is bright and growing brighter, the child is laughing, But long years of grief have frozen me cold and lonely I linger here still with the rain and my regrets—

Then again, the miracle of summer rain and your grandmother’s song inside that song. And the tulips aching to be free, hum hum humming along.

Maybe they’ll think it was the language we spoke to one another to say what we longed for, the language we used to say one day when I’m gone, and you’re out among the trees, please, please remember me.

Below the willows while they wept, the sun swept its faceless face down the edge of the river. Ducklings tailed the twilight light, vanishing quickly, toward the horizon where, it seemed, even truth and beauty vanished.

the grapes contained, in each form, the memory of the land and the hands that remade them.

I found my way here less because and more in spite of, to spite the land and the hands I’d been dealt.

Perhaps it’s true, and I’m too selfish, wanting all the credit, to savor the beauty of not having saved myself entirely by myself. Will you look at that?

The news says that being outside today is the equivalent of smoking five cigarettes, but I can’t stop staring at the egg yolk sun because it feels, I don’t know, important, like I have to bear witness, like seeing it will make me persuasive on questions of climate change and political action,

I hadn’t spoken to a stranger on a plane in years, and it was nice to feel social, to enjoy the seatmate serendipity of air travel, and even when she started recounting lies from the internet, false stories, conspiracy theories, I thought it would be good practice at keeping my cool, good practice at being a good pedagogue, and I thought I had been gently and genuinely persuasive in my debunkings until about an hour into the flight when she said “You’re very well informed” in a way that was oddly insulting, dismissive,

It is her fault the world is on fire, isn’t it? Her and people like her, people who vote for lies because it’s more fun than the truth. People more excited to burn everything down in righteous rage and pious anger than to do the hard work of figuring out what’s really wrong and then trying to fix it? Why was I polite when the world is on fire?

but let’s get real, just because someone said something to her that made her go red-pill-looney-tunes doesn’t mean there was something I could have said to restore her grip on reality.

This is my staircase fantasy: that there was some mic drop moment I could have had, some brilliant zinger that would have made her worry more about climate change than the imaginary

I would have known what to say for the past thirty years, that I could have convinced everyone I have ever met to do whatever it took to not get here, where the sun is a faded saffron blot and the world burns every summer, and the bees are dying, and the glaciers are melting, and the ocean is full of plastic, and I told you already, I’m not coping very well, standing here constructing narratives of things I should have said to a stranger on a plane while burning out my retina.