Nature Poem

by Tommy Pico

  At one point, there was a point. The air was still, I think. The sky was yellow at dusk and we were like cameos, flushed against the mountains.

  Then there was lots of stuff. Like identifying with pinole. Like the struggle. Like love.

  It’s hard to unhook the heavy marble Nature from the chain around yr neck

  when history is stolen like water.

  Reclamation suggests social

  capital

  In the opening poem of her book Of Gods & Strangers, Tina Chang writes, “As the trees split, a religion crashed to a moan./People were shocked to learn the sky was not a chariot of water.”

  America learned it scarcely rains in San Diego. Water was a battlefield and within just 20 years, from 1850 to 1870, the indigenous population fell by 60%

  Look at all your family and friends

  I am missing many cousins, have you seen them?

  Anthropologists write “population decline” with the gentle implication of a drying fog. “Recourse” suggests resources. People say get over.

  I read a lot. It’s hard, but I’m starting to see the chariot of water.

  No one told me abt “Space Oddity” by David Bowie

  Everyone must feel fresh and weird, and perhaps rightly so

  in the sense that yr the only one who has been you—

  a slap in the face of squiggly sperm and probability

  How cd u not feel like a miracle

  in the sense that everyone in yr line had to survive primordial waves of SoCal dehydration, waves of European disease, active predation by men

  whose bullets were bought by the US government the pendulum of genocidal legislation intended to rob yr tribe of it’s sovereignty, the cultural bleach of NDN boarding schools that robbed yr grandmother’s generation of the language, meth infestation of the 80s, and like George W. Bush

  Ground Control really came around to Major Tom

  and then loses him, like an orbit

  Despite the flatness of the intro, I heard a ring of “traditional” motherly concern in the first two lines, take your protein pills and put yr helmet on vs the classical kind of detached father in the next line, Check ignition and may God’s love be with you

  An explosion of belief from the skeptical Ground Control

  after the rocket launch, how can you account for a spontaneous recognition of talent

  really floods the drum we call ear

  and given the parental tint I heard in the beginning

  I keep mishearing the soft lyric tell my wife I love her very much

  to tell my mom

  I tell the rez, I think my spaceship knows which way to go

  I read abt shifting linguistics abt the extinction of such-and-such tribe in so-and-so’s novel in verse, a metaphor in the narrative of a dying relationship

  Metaphor, the traditional function of indigenous ppl in the grand canon of lit

  I look up from my trickle to the epochs above—

  There’s a line in the movie Smoke Signals, the only thing more pathetic than NDNs on TV is NDNs watching NDNs on TV I cringe

  at my cousin’s dream catcher tattoo like bb that’s not even our tribe

  but I walked around for two whole lucid-ass years wearing bone chokers wanting an artifact of my identity wanting life or death to touch something of the rugged absence

  Absence, as if Kumeyaay just didn’t show up, as if it slept in, as if there weren’t a government intent on extermination

  I’ll never write a nature poem w/feather imagery or booze or that describes a slow pocket of dew in a SoCal Feb AM

  It was first a thrill

  to see a tribe in those hugging pages

  I took what I cd get

  But now I see the night and she is dancing bird

  It took tons

  for me to come to this relationship

  with even a thin crust mantle of optimism.

  You say to yrself, into the mirror, the humidifier misting behind you—

  Okay, first a selfie—

  You say, I’m going to do this. We’re doing this. Slipping into love like sleep.

  What is it inside nature

  that turns a color into danger,

  a season into a reminder of sitting across each other across a tinny table, copperish, unseasonably hot in our tall bodies no shade

  while I waited

  for the words I knew were coming.

  Evolution is not very Victoria Beckham

  is a thing I felt like saying

  to myself on the subway ride home. And, when will my neck finally be long enough to reach the leaves

  in the canopy?

  My singing teacher says, just focus on yr breath.

  I don’t know how to explain this next part, other than to say I don’t find breathing very relaxing, Pam. Can’t you see I’m trying super hard not to focus on my breath? I’m

  trying to forget.

  I look up at night thinking

  and getting dizzy so I have to sit down

  How many of you are there, up in the flat sky outside the city.

  Vibrato is great on a lake with the doug firs pointing upwards, but I can’t help it I miss the city. I miss the city when I’m in the city. Where am I?

  That’ssssssss, okay, that’s fine. Pam says. Move to the country of yr breath,

  but you still have to sing the note, and the next

  one and the next.

  Nature kisses me outside the movie theater

  I can’t tell if it was a romantic comedy or a scary movie bc of politics

  When Nature palms my neck I can’t tell if it’s a romantic comedy or a scary movie bc the clarity of desire terrifies me like a stage

  comfort only leads to predation, and anything marvelous

  becomes holy in the Google translate of humanity

  I prefer to keep it very doggy style

  bc holy roars untouchable, tempers flare

  and ppl die, violently, all over the world throughout time

  The difference btwn me at 15 and me now is being called a faggot was humiliating bc I thought faggotry was hot, sulfuric garbage

  but now in the arclight of a self not unmade by shame, tho the violence is scary w/this pale brawny NYU shithead callin us faggots,

  the sentiment sounds more like ice

  clinkin in a tumbler of vodka lemonade

  Who dis?

  You can’t be an NDN person in today’s world

  and write a nature poem. I swore to myself I would never write a nature poem. Let’s be clear, I hate nature—hate its guts

  I say to my audience. There is something smaller I say to myself:

  I don’t hate nature at all. Places have thoughts—hills have backs that love being stroked by our eyes. The river gobbles down its tract as a metaphor but also abt its day. The bluffs purr when we put down blankets at the downturn of the sun and laugh at a couple on a obvi OkCupid date

  and even more stellar, the jellybean moon sugars at me. She flies and beams and I breathe.

  Fuck that. I recant. I slap myself.

  Let’s say I live in NYC. Let’s say I was the first person in my family to graduate college. Let’s say UGH I like watching New Girl on Hulu.

  This is the difference:

  Some see objects in the Earth, where I see lungs. Sky mother falls thru a hole, lands on a turtle.

  Hole is my favorite band.

  Body

  of text is the Lazarus

  a deathless tablet, the Enheduanna

  like a Freddy or a Jason?

  Won’t stay dead

  No, weirdo.

  We r suggesting the vigor lives

  like horror, but it’s opposite. You also inherit the strengths of yr lineage.

  What survives is improbable. What claps back is a miracle.

  What if a poem was just the interpretation?

  No, no. Put yr shirt back on.

  We compare hand sizes in bed I say I just want to be on the same page
r />   You are one person with me, and someone different by yourself—here,

  you can be with me and by yourself at the same

  time. How are we doing?

  “Fast Car” by Tracy Chapman is literally the best song in human history. It’s one of those songs where, u listen to other songs n yr like . . . these are all crap. Everything I read, listen to, and see is reminding me of “Fast Car” by Tracy Chapman rn.

  Repeating patterns, the mistakes of yr parents, running but not getting very far. Not as far as you wanted but maybe farther than you think. In the beginning she’s like let’s take yr fast car and get out of here. Then they live together and she’s like let’s get away from our . . . domestic issues . . . by taking a ride in yr fast car (feeling tethered to a feature can really keep ppl in a shitty situation). And then at the very end she’s like yr a drunk and you take yr fast car and get the fuck out of here.

  How far can you actually get away from the bases?

  Body

  Let’s never go to Vegas

  k?

  Body let’s never talk

  to those who feel nothing

  in front of neon signs,

  or those who talk

  abt how death is the only perfection.

  Are we confronting thots, or pushing them aside? I want to fuck

  Hey, I remember the 90s

  I was friends with the 90s

  I had anxiety in the 90s

  I remember hearing Princess Di died on the radio not knowing who she was but my mother was weirdly devastated talking abt it to the paramedics carrying away my auntie

  To be comfortable in your cement is a miracle. It hugs,

  it feels like a voice. A voice has skin. I am looking at the stars on the sea. Let’s never go go

  There’s no such thing as a perfect ending. You just have to stand up and say, I’m ready to leave.

  When a star dies, it becomes any number of things

  like a black hole, or a documentary.

  The early universe of our skin was remarkably smooth

  now I stand in a rapidly dampening Christina Aguilera tee

  The first stars were born of a gravity, my ancestors—

  our sky is really the only thing same for me as it was for them,

  which is a pretty stellar inheritance

  I don’t know how they made sense of that swell, how they survived long enough to make me, and am sort of at war with sentimentality, generally

  but that absence of an answer, yet suggestion of meaning

  isn’t ultimately that different from a poem

  So I’ve started reading the stars

  Nothing is possible until it happens, like digesting sulfur instead of sunlight

  or friends with benefits

  Poems were my scripture and the poets, my gods

  but even gods I mean especially gods are subject to the artifice

  of humanity.

  I look up at the poem, all of them up there in the hot sky and fall

  into the water, a stone

  What if I really do feel connected to the land?

  What if the mountains around the valley where I was born

  What if I see them like faces when I close my eyes

  What if I said hi to them in the mornings and now all their calls go to voicemail

  What if I would ride my big wheels down the drive too fast headfirst into the chaparral and I’d steal myself from them scratchy having felt the pulse

  What if I said sorry under my breath when I sat on moss on the rock at the crick behind myself

  I would look like a freaking moron basket case

  I get so disappointed by stupid NDNs writing their dumb nature poems like grow up faggots

  I look this thought full in the face and want to throw myself into traffic

  Admit it. This is the poem you wanted all along.

  It’s hard to be anything

  but a pessimist

  when you feel the Earth rotting away on so many home pages and Taylor Swift is an idiot and cigarettes

  cost an arm and a leg

  I’m on a porch petting kitties and there is lavender in the air. The sun is over the hill and my friend Roy knows the names of all the plants in his front yard. One of the kitties is named Witch Baby and she likes to perch around your neck.

  The air is clear, and all across Instagram—peeps are posting pics of the sunset.

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS:

  Excerpts from this poem have appeared in Apogee, No Tokens, Fanzine, Western Beefs of North America, Familiars Quarterly, Imperial Matters, the Offing, 429 Magazine, Cosmonauts Avenue, Pinwheel, Public Pool, the Washington Square Review, the Felt, Tin House, February: an Anthology, Hobart, 90’s Meg Ryan, Glittermob, Out Magazine, Ocho, Hello Mr., and New York Tyrant

  Shout out to Matthew, Tony, and the whole Tin House team for letting me get my way most of the time. Thanks to Roy Pérez, on whose couch I wrote the original 23-page zine version of this book, to Morgan Parker who sent the final manuscript to Tin House, and to everyone who gave me stage time in between to work out the “material.” Thanks again to Cat Glennon for the beautiful book cover, Lauren Wilkinson for our writing dates, and the Kumeyaay nation for incubating me.

  PRAISE FOR

  IRL

  “Tommy Pico’s epic poem is sad and funny and honest and wickedly clever with rhymes and rhythms. It is an utterly original aboriginal look at the world. I love it.”

  —SHERMAN ALEXIE

  “On the narrowing frontier between song & speech, memory & oblivion, future & no future, Native & American, IRL is Heraclitan, a river of text and sweat, whipping worlds into the silence of white pages: a new masterpiece. And a new kind of masterpiece. It’s a lyric epic of desire whose hero renounces heroism.”

  —ARIANA REINES

  “Pico, in his poetry, creates unsettling juxtapositions, which can have a comic or a dramatic effect—or, most often, some combination of the two.”

  —THE NEW YORKER

  “Brilliant, funny, and musical. . . . [Pico] invokes Gertrude Stein and Sherman Alexie as naturally as he does Beyoncé. Pico’s skillful rendering . . . proves to be entertaining, enlightening, and utterly relatable in the age of the smartphone.”

  —PUBLISHERS WEEKLY, Starred Review

  TOMMY “TEEBS” PICO is the author of IRL (Birds LLC, 2016), Junk (forthcoming from Tin House Books) and the zine series Hey, Teebs. He was the founder and editor in chief of birdsong, an antiracist/queer-positive collective, small press, and zine that published art and writing from 2008–2013. He was a Queer/Art/Mentors inaugural fellow, 2013 Lambda Literary fellow in poetry, and a 2016 Tin House summer poetry scholar. Originally from the Viejas Indian reservation of the Kumeyaay nation, he now lives in Brooklyn where he co-curates the reading series Poets With Attitude (PWA) with Morgan Parker, co-hosts the podcast Food 4 Thot, and is a contributing editor at Literary Hub.

  @heyteebs

  Copyright © 2017 Tommy Pico

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission from the publisher except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews. For information, contact Tin House Books, 2617 NW Thurman St., Portland, OR 97210.

  Published by Tin House Books, Portland, Oregon, and Brooklyn, New York

  Distributed by W. W. Norton & Company

  The Library of Congress has cataloged the printed edition as follows:

  Names: Pico, Tommy, author.

  Title: Nature poem / by Tommy Pico.

  Description: First U.S. edition. | Portland, Oregon : Tin House Books, 2017.

  Identifiers: LCCN 2016056390 (print) | LCCN 2017010729 (ebook) |

  ISBN 9781941040638 (softcover : acid-free paper) | ISBN 9781941040645

  Classification: LCC PS3616.I288 A6 2017 (print) | LCC PS3616.I288 (ebook) |

  DDC 811/.6—dc23

  LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2016056390
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  First U.S. Edition 2017

  Interior design by Jakob Vala

  www.tinhouse.com