Someone said to me, your poems are so dark—
Write about nature instead. But it’s autumn now,
and fall reminds us, in our bodies, in our bones,
that we’re not doing this right: We’re not
at home in this world anymore. For millennia
everything on earth evolved except humans…
we are now as we were three hundred thousand
years ago. But how we live changed, and the loss
of light reminds us that nature is not amused.
We ignore its cues, the fatigue we feel as dusk
arrives sooner and sooner: we throw electric
light at the darkness and carry on as if
we could control time itself. Nature reminds
us, but we don’t listen, our schedules driven
by pressures that have nothing to do with the
way our bodies need to live in the world.
Once, for a time, I stayed in a dune shack with
inadequate kerosene lamps; I went to sleep soon
after sunset, awoke at sunrise. No insomnia:
My body breathed a sigh of relief, settling back
into the patterns it craved. I wrote two hundred
pages in those weeks, effortlessly, marveling
(once I returned to my world of artificial
daylight) that it could be done without working
to a schedule that makes my body rebel. So—should
I write about nature? I think not: it would not thank
me. The darkness I explore in my poems is only
an echo of the star-studded nights… we ignore.