You Are Here: Poetry in the Natural World

by Ada Limon

the old mulberry tree that drapes its tired branches over everything like it wants to give up but won’t. Watching them makes me feel at once more human and less human. I become aware that I am in a body, yes, but it is a body connected to these trees, and we are breathing together.

poems are like trees in this way. They let us breathe together. In each line break, caesura, and stanza, there’s a place for us to breathe. Not unlike a redwood forest or a line of crepe myrtles in an otherwise cement landscape, poems can be a place to stop and remember that we too are living. W.S. Merwin wrote in his poem “Place”: “On the last day of the world, I would want to plant a tree.” I think I would add that I would also like to write a poem. Maybe I’d even write a poem about a tree?

How can a poem make a difference? How can a tree make a difference? Perhaps the answer to those questions is that poetry and nature have a way of simply reminding us that we are not alone. The Kentucky writer bell hooks once wrote, “Rarely, if ever, are any of us healed in isolation. Healing is an act of communion.” Going to the woods, or simply noticing the small defiant ways nature is thriving all around me on a daily basis, helps me feel that communion. And poems, like the poems that I’ve collected here for this anthology, help me feel that sense of communion too.

When creating green spaces or attempting to rewild an area, it’s not about planting one tree, but many. It’s not simply about the overstory, but the wild grasses and shrubs and living creatures in the understory. This anthology hopes to be both the canopy and the soil—not just a community, but a living ecosystem made stronger by all its parts. As Robin Wall Kimmerer wrote in Braiding Sweetgrass, “All flourishing is mutual.”

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.

Most of all, these poems honor what feelings and lessons nature gives us. In her poem, Dorianne Laux writes, “I felt large inside my life,” and Victoria Chang writes in hers, “In Alaska, my life was with me again, attached for now.” Patricia Smith allows for a vibrating instruction in her poem: “Blossom when you’re ready, but rough.” Here, poems serve as a witnessing as much as they do incantations.

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.

You belong to the world. The hands that put a peach tree into the earth exactly where the last one died in the freeze belong to the world and will someday feed it again, differently, your body will become food again for something, just as it did so humorously when you became a mother, hungry beings clamoring at your breast, born as they’d been with the bodily passion for survival that is our kind’s one common feature. You belong to the world, animal. Deal with it. Even as the great abstractions come to take you away, the regrets, the distractions, you can at any second come back to the world to which you belong, the world you never left, won’t ever leave, cells forever, forever going through their changes, as they have been since you were less than

what I am looking for doesn’t matter. that I am looking doesn’t matter. I exert no meaning.

for how long will they stay. that I am looking doesn’t matter. I will impose no meaning.

Of late the dead have quit their midnight visits. They ask to swing by sometime, without ringing first— Thank you, no. Think I’ll stay here, friends, in sunlight at the start of summer,

TO A BLOSSOMING SAGUARO You have kin in Mexico. Shooting you is called “cactus plugging.” Humidity & wind speed shape the path of a bullet. 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. Ofelia believes only rain can touch all of you. My mother is my favorite immigrant. After her? The sonnet.

NATURE, WHICH CANNOT BE DRIVEN TO To drive to it is to drive through it. Like a stalker, it is in the back seat of the car. It’s in the passenger seat, and the wires of the radio. You want to think of it as a destination, a two-week break from purchase power. Though you have purchased much to get there. Certain shoes, with certain soles. Like an exile in a self-made skiff 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. Could have done—a part of speech referred to as a “modal of lost opportunities.” Nature is the parts of speech, having learned them, and having forgotten them. It is the singular pronoun “you” looking in the mirror, realizing you could have done more to hold on to your beauty. Who are you kidding? 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

Nature is this sort of nostalgia. It is human nature. How you parse and equivocate, your selective memory. The tilt of your sentences. Without habitat, nature encroaches, stripping the pods from garden peas in the suburbs. If you have the guts to walk at 3 a.m. you will see whole antlered herds under the stars, chewing and peeing at the same time, and watch the pee steam in the induction light of street lamps. Foxes hurry down sidewalks as if they are late for a meeting, counting their steps, a number which will legitimize their presence on the planet.

Rabbits leap in patterns across boulevards named after trees. There is something in suburban rabbits that has evolved toward wickedness, their tails like an implement developed for hospitals, to mop up blood.

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 WOMAN WITH A BIRD A bald eagle called out to another as magpies attacked their nest. Someone called it romantic. I believed her. The magpies, the ferryman, God, the poets, everything seemed romantic in Alaska, where people breathed out white birds. When I breathed, nothing came out. The eagles sat side by side and I wondered why they stayed long after the magpies had gone. At first, I thought the eagle was watching me. Then I realized the eagle was my life watching me. The distance between my life and myself had become too far. Because of my desire to find a way out of my life. When that happens, our breath comes out elsewhere. As if each day, I walked in a door but came out of another door. I wondered what country my breath came out in. When the male eagle finally flew off to a distant tree, the female didn’t follow. I felt something in my body attach and heard a clicking noise. I had been holding my breath for decades, while others painted my breasts, one white, one brown. 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.

YOU MUST BE PRESENT, i say to myself when the what wheres all up in the how now—trees! 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) climbing onto their shoulders. honestly, i was a ladybug to them—only heavier & more annoying. those trees i grew up with were generations older than me. they were practiced at living in a way i will never understand & all i could imagine was the view from their crown. oak trees. they were oak trees with their own history of migration. rooted in calumet city like me. if i asked them for answers, i wouldn’t have understood: sunlight. water. sunlight. water. sunlight. water.

REDWOODS The first time I entered a forest I saw the trees, of course, huddled together in rings, thin veils of mist between their branches, some dead but still standing, or fallen thigh bones on the desiccated floor, but I also saw the great buttery platters of fungus climbing like stepping stones up their shaggy trunks: tzadee, tzadee, tzadee, each a different size: small to large or large to small, as if some rogue architect had been cocky enough to install them on the stunned trees’ northern sides, leading up to the balcony of their one ton boughs. I was here to investigate my place among them, these giants, 3000 years old, still here, living in my lifetime. I should have felt small, a mere human—petty in my clumsy boots, burrs in my socks, while these trees held a glossary of stars in their crowns, their heads up there in the croissant-shaped clouds, the wisdom of the ages flowing up through from root to branchlet— though rather I felt large inside my life, the sum of Jung’s archetypes: the self, the shadow, the anima, the persona of my personhood fully recognized and finally accepted, the nugget of my being, my shadow of plush light. 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.

Drought is an old war.

They planned our thirst for centuries.

LULLABY FOR THE GRIEVING at the Sipsey River make small steps. in this wild place there are signs of life everywhere. sharp spaces, too: the slip of a rain-glazed rock against my searching feet. small steps, like prayers— each one a hope exhaled into the trees. please, let me enter. please, let me leave whole. there are, too, the tiny sounds of faraway birds. the safety in their promise of song. the puddle forming, finally, after summer rain. the golden butterfly against the cave-dark. maybe there are angels here, too— what else can i call the crown of light atop the leaves? what else can i call my footsteps forward, small, small, sure?

LETTERS Rain has eaten 1/4 of me yet I believe against all evidence these raindrops are my letters of recommendation here is a man worth falling on.

The moth has no Wednesdays.

She can almost read cursive now; there are curves without words.

Puh puh, puh go the little moths, addicted to secrecy. Algorithms have just been invented. There are thoughts without thinking. Outside, phone numbers with recently-added hyphens tumble through suburban air.

Inside, the mother thinks not everything needs to be worried about—or, the child would like the mother to think that. The moth-mothers think nothing. ˇˇˇˇ The moth-babies flutter from sweater drawers & are snagged like the yearning in dreams. Outside, new freeways cross the land: light & form, form & light, extra space in the ampersand—

She’s almost two. I’m seventy-five. 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. Love and dread are brethren said a mystic woman in the Middle Ages. For a moment the sun reclines on the bare branches of the maples. They’re rinsed with gold. And then the light is gone. The tree is itself again. It’s time to return the baby to her father. The long beam of the lighthouse strobes the path. I put her in the stroller and start walking fast.

The old grasses, prescribed fire.

What do you mean the wind is not alive? Look at the way it courts the shy juniper. Can’t you see its reliable visits every afternoon? Its secure attachment style to its own wet and thunderous passions? Let’s go be alive like that, like rattlesnakes making a cursive communion on the road at night. They say it’s the heat trapped in the asphalt that draws them but I know it’s the way the stars ambush their loneliness with their communities of fire, the waning moon glowing like a hypothesis, the snakes curling their bodies into a yes.

Everybody adores a lion But me. I want to be a giraffe. I’m already tall and long-necked. In the real Sahara, a giraffe beats A lion’s ass every day On Instagram. I’ve seen A giraffe shake the leaping cat Off its back and toss it like litter. I’ve seen a giraffe stomp hooves Down hard on the lion’s face Before it got the chance To meow. I want to be a giraffe And eat greens of every variety Straight out the tree. I already Like to get high. Lions need Animals like us. We need no prey. I already won’t chase anybody For my food. But maybe I can still be romantic. Maybe I can still be romantic in spite Of my pride. Someone will notice. Up the sky, Not down the street. You can watch me while I watch you And the rest of the savanna From my aerial view. Lord, Let me get higher. Just one of me Is a parade.

THERE ARE MORE WAYS TO SHOW DEVOTION than we can ever know in this lifetime once you traced a finger along the traffic of webs in the distance stitched along the top right corner of the window frame troubling the sun its beams breaking apart at the web’s center a single open eye flicking light along our open hands the spider builds a new web every day bigger each time in the left corner and then the right the spider once worked above us while we slept & then in the morning the spider spun itself into silent waiting or longing maybe invisible but for its hunger which is another word for desire if desperation were off the table & all that remained were two open arms waiting for an agreeable heart but it is like me to imagine the spider believes itself a failure what with its dance from corner to corner its web eclipsing more & more of the woodwork with each passing day & still nothing to show for it but another night of tearing down & rebuilding & another morning of light stumbling into a window laughing at the barren web which is a plea a moan a disaster of a lonely maze 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 yourself able to touch again I think another word for this is hunger I make the bed in the mornings now every day it looks new again like no one has ev...

We corrupt a landscape through the planting of foreign flowers. Borders are so often theorized as division, wending along with a spot of sunlight,

Words arranged for prayer are in fact geometric forms or portraits of poets themselves, uncovering the dictates of a graven line.

Reimagining can take place at the root of time, out of all necessity we convert the elements as a matter of course.

Everything at once, she had said. All that you remember must be written down.

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

My grandfather vanished into the land of the yellow jackets, swerving in their upper kingdoms.

Today is a rare day. 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.

It’s said that those who sleep under a hackberry will be protected from evil spirits,

Kretzschmaria deusta, a beautifully named fungus ate the roots from the inside

we were here before the people & here before the people who ate the people, our mouths older than the hunger after war. you could not survive our music. we sing to your dead, who we cannot kill. our sisters bashed on the roadside, we trample your missed in their names. they know us as the drums in their dirt sky. keep out, we could confuse you for dead. we might put a song on your head. // we are loyal to the moon. we lie to the sun, but the sun doesn’t notice us, you do, in it, your mind making ghosts of us, you take our pictures throw us your bread. fools we have your dead and have seen what you do with yours, how you make them. why have your gods allowed you? so arrogantso soft if we had horns, we’d do your god’s work. we’d lift you in the air. we’d lay you on the green earth. our horns red until rain.

their world appeared around us then their dead soon followed we are older than these limits. so why are we in the cage? because we need to survive. why do we need to be in the cage to survive? because they will make use of us if they don’t find us beautiful.

who is my father? she ask me, I don’t have language for her, for us, the night I fell asleep at my mother’s side and woke with her cradled toward my milk, only the mouthless moon could confess, no answer in her light, my mother, my daughter, my portal, my sum my maker, my making, my composer, my note I don’t have language for what she wants and even in language a him can’t happen. the moon won’t speak. who is my mother? I ask her. She lowers her head to the grass. she opens her mouth. yes, my girl. that way. //

Because I was terrified, I learned nothing. I had stepped in a papery nest of ground wasps: a hateful swarm of them wreathed up around me and writhed and sang wordless rage. One stung me on the neck and I think I was shocked more than I was hurt: afraid of moving even an inch because that was what the world had become. I wonder if its frantic sting was death for the insect whose mind was all red. I don’t know my mind so I’m making up a story:

atop what the arborist calls unhealable wound. I need to slip this tree inside myself: crystallize its images into words which, if never made real, are still reproducible. What purpose, otherwise, is grief? Otherwise why watch this tree wither to ground, why follow it to its final abandonment? Here is my small replenishing: each year making the flowers in mind more vibrant, plentiful. It feeds some kind of denial, yes, but without which no past, no future left to choose from. 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.

I am learning that shifting through ailments, in particular, is how to make peace with anything happening at any moment, and that moving in and out of tricky comfort zones is a kind of subtle reckoning with mortality. Such as your foot stinging with numbness: you are no longer able to put weight on one foot; or your needing your nebulizer to open your chest in the middle of the night: a humming of inhalation to release breath, to help ease pain.