To drive to it’s to drive by way of it.
Like a stalker, it’s within the again seat of the automobile.
It’s within the passenger seat, and the wires of the radio.
You wish to consider it as a vacation spot,
a two-week break from buy energy,
although you might have bought a lot to get there.
Sure footwear, with sure soles.
Like an exile in a self-made skiff
in the midst of a tortured sea, nature
is what you might have executed to it.
Nature is you, and the doing to it,
and your platitudes, and the wishing
you would do extra, or might have executed extra.
May have executed—part of speech known as
a “modal of misplaced alternatives.” Nature
is the components of speech, having realized them,
and having forgotten them. It’s the singular
pronoun you trying within the mirror,
realizing you would have executed extra to carry on
to your magnificence. Who’re you kidding?
You have been by no means stunning. There was nothing
to carry on to. Nature is the way you have been born,
with a birthmark that blazed whenever you cried,
centered proper between your brows
like a bull’s-eye. There was a time, you wish to say.
You fed apples to horses by way of barbed-wire
fences. You slept for nights on finish
in a fishing shack constructed on a pier within the center
of a pond deeper than anybody might calculate.
You knew the place the morels grew,
and the watercress, which you pulled and ate
with out embellishment. What did it style like?
It tasted inexperienced. Nature is that this type of nostalgia.
It’s human nature. The way you parse and equivocate,
your selective reminiscence. The lean of your sentences.
With out habitat, nature encroaches, stripping
the pods from backyard peas within the suburbs.
When you have the center to stroll at 3 a.m. you will notice
entire antlered herds beneath the celebs, chewing
and peeing on the similar time, and watch
the pee steam within the induction gentle of road lamps.
Foxes hurry down sidewalks
as if they’re late for a gathering, counting
their steps, a quantity that can legitimize
their presence on the planet. No marvel
their smiles are self-satisfied. Rabbits leap
in patterns throughout boulevards named after timber.
There’s something in suburban rabbits
that has advanced towards wickedness,
their tails like an implement developed
for hospitals, to mop up blood.
Nature can’t be redeemed. It’s your want
to redeem it, to set issues proper.
It’s the impossibility of redemption.
It’s the lover strolling out, their self-justified gait
as they disappear by way of the tunnel of flowers.
This poem has been excerpted from the gathering You Are Right here, edited by Ada Limón.
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