You Are Here: Poetry in the Natural World

by Ada Limon

W.S. Merwin wrote in his poem “Place”: “On the last day of the world, I would want to plant a tree.”

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.

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

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.

Nature is this sort of nostalgia. It is human nature. How you parse and equivocate, your selective memory. The tilt of your sentences.

A neighbor says rabbitbrush, and I should be afraid to be so unprepared: herdless human, without instinct for the West. But what comes first is wonder at the word, at having woken someplace new. I once believed I wouldn’t see another winter.

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.

For months all I’ve wanted is the blessing of an open window. Maybe also I’ve wanted to sleep through the night.

Would you call it a wound, I asked a doctor because there are hurts that mean so little. I want to say nothing imprecise. I want to stand (like I could, then) in the pine shade of those trees

Because if you can survive the violet night, you can survive the next, and the fig tree will ache with sweetness for you in sunlight that arrives first at your window, quietly pawing even when you can’t stand it, and you’ll heavy the whining floorboards of the house you filled with animals as hurt and lost as you,

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