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
like a bull’s-eye. There was a time, you want to say.
You fed apples to horses through barbed-wire
fences. You slept for nights on end
in a fishing shack built on a pier in the middle
of a pond deeper than anyone could calculate.
You knew where the morels grew,
and the watercress, which you pulled and ate
without embellishment. What did it taste like?
It tasted green. 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 that will legitimize
their presence on the planet. No wonder
their smiles are self-satisfied. 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.
This poem has been excerpted from the collection You Are Here, edited by Ada Limón.
