You Are Here: Poetry in the Natural World

by Ada Limon

STAIRCASE I’m not coping very well, but who is, really? I’m somatizing stress, sleeping badly, eating too much candy, drinking too much alcohol, forgetting to exercise or hydrate properly, falling behind on everything, and the sun today is an alarmingly dull shade of orange, a well-cut circle of marigold construction paper in a pale rust sky. I am looking directly at the sun because the ash clouds from the wild fires a country away have settled over this place so thick and so heavy that the brightness and the yellow have been stripped from the sun’s rays before they reach my eyes, the particulate haze bouncing back the splendor, diffusing it. 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, or something, so here I am inhaling this carcinogenic cloud of oxidized carbon when clearly I should go inside and close the windows, drink some water, meditate, do some yoga, read a book, anything really that is not standing here staring at the sun, breathing in cancer, letting my mind wander to the woman next to me on my flight home from Ohio last week, who kept repeating hoaxes to me as though they were true. 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 ...

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