I’m sure Nature has disapproved of me
for years, as if it had overheard
one of my silent screeds against it,
and my insistence that only the artificial
has a real shot at becoming more
than what we started with, designed,
revised, something completely itself.
If it could speak, Nature might say
it contains lilies, the strange beauty
of swamps, the architectural art
of spiders, the many etceteras
that make the world the world.
Nothing man-made can compete,
Nature might say. Oh Nature
has been known to go on and on.
And if it wanted to push things further,
it could site our sleek perfection
of bombs and instruments of torture,
our nature so human we hide
behind words that disguise and justify.
But that’s as generous as I want to be
in giving Nature its say. I’ve seen it
randomly play its violence card—
natural, no-motive crimes
with hail and rain and vicious winds
taking out, say, trailer courts and
playing fields and homes for the elderly.
So I want to be heard and overheard,
this time for real, out loud, in fact
right in Nature’s face, to say I prefer
the artifice in what’s called artificial,
the often concealed skill involved,
without which we’d have no accurate
view of ourselves, or of lilies in a pond.