You Are Here: Poetry in the Natural World

by Ada Limon

That day, I walked the waterfalls, where water runs clear and cold through the soft hills. I was totally alone and each time my brain wanted to reach toward something awful—I was reminded that I was here. I repeated, you are here, you are here. And you are 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.

Because nature is not a place to visit. Nature is who we are.

You belong to the world, animal. Deal with it.

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.

I love the big beauties too—the dark rain veil making a bride of the mountain. The old grasses, prescribed fire. And the ridge where the wind tries to get under my shirt.

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.

I want to say nothing imprecise. I want to stand (like I could, then) in the pine shade of those trees and not fill up with murky nausea, soothed some by nicotine. This will help, my grandfather said. Like magic, you wait and see.

I watched it, once, eased into the ground where a neighbor planted it; now I watch her son take it down, take with it all the buds of its renewing, flowers always on the verge of flowering into a future that will not reliably come. 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? Here is my small replenishing: each year making the flowers in mind more vibrant, plentiful.

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.

On the Golden Record that’s out of the solar system now, scientists deemed the sound of birds important enough to include as a marker of our planet. Listening this morning to a clip of what someone or something might hear one day, I can’t help but wonder if they’ll even know what it is. 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.

And in the Netherlands, magpies and crows are turning hostile architecture into homes, constructing cyberpunk nests from anti-bird spikes— strips of sharp metal pins meant to keep them from perching on buildings. I’m definitely rooting for the birds —they’re fighting back a bit, said the Dutch biologist studying the phenomenon.

Resistance is struggle against impossible circumstance, refusal, the will to survive in the face of annihilation; it can also be the surviving remnant enacting revenge.

HELIOPHILIA Desire to stay in the sun / love of sunlight Don’t call it an affliction— call it affection. I’d stay under the sun all day, never hiding under a copse of trees if I knew I wouldn’t burn, but isn’t it more accurate—that I burn for the sun? To be pulled to the light is nothing to be ashamed of:

Insatiable. Seriously. Something (a possum?) dragged a skull (a possum’s?) in through the doggy door and set it in a spot of empty floor where we’d be sure to see it. Scoured and tan as smokers’ teeth, it hissed, “insatiable.” Come August, such effulgence, it’s like showering in a 3-D movie: Gold- finch squads in Speedos yo-yo through the stems, turn hard and vanish peripherally. One cad outside the glass flashed me the shadow running down his ripped finch abs! I was naked and coughed up a bona fide gasp.

Blossom when you’re ready, but rough. Be quaint explosive.

Risk that breathlessness. Risk day, risk slap of sun, risk yawning wide, risk the itch and choke of it, the damned wheel of days, growth and all the dirty water it took. Then be that quaint explosive. Growl out with howling, red vibrato, and own everything weather has done to you. Bellow, girl. Blossom.

one day you’ll put your hands in the earth and understand an afterlife isn’t promised, but the spray of scorpion grass keeps growing, and the dogs will sing their whole bodies in praise of you, and the redbuds will lay down their pink crowns, and the rivers will set their stones and ribbons at your door if only you’ll let the world soften you with its touching.