Charles Tarlton

 

Mother Nature

Fierce invisible mosquitoes
blitz your ears
and the rain runs down
your collar. In the morning
it's cold, so cold you can't get up
to make the fire.
                  In the back
of your throat, yesterday's threatened
grippe rampages now.
                     You diagnose a fever,
and stretch for your jacket hanging
slightly out of reach, unveiling
reddening lacerations, infections
where yesterday the thorns
along the trail cut into your arms.

Morning in the wilderness!



Natural Causes

Tumors flourish in their own
wilderness, our body's ecosystems,
stochastic rearrangements

of molecules that generate
mutations all along secret savage
overgrowths and undergrowths.

Cancerous, invasive, metastatic
cells populate, migrate, repopulate
the habitat, our habits

and alibis, the desolate
stuff of tragedies; the wilderness
gapes back—
            natural and unaffected.

Nature

1

Nature swallows us up. We live
in bewildering chemistries;
we calculate conception according to
the same vectors as decay.
                           Events divide
and divide again, into themselves
and each arising other.

2

                           That spring
we tore at the encroaching
forests, bending the trees
to our architect's caprice.
Graders and a yellow excavator
followed down the middle
on hydraulic principles
the same in pumps and pistons
as in the fall of icy streams
when they go under the roots
loosening rocks and whole hillsides.

When each lever was pulled
and the tilting buckets disemboweled
the earth, the force
that lifted scooped-up dirt in triumph
was the same as drives the sap.

3

Nature has no preferences.
The commotions of artists
forging beauty weigh
no more than one-celled
microscopic protozoa waving
invisible flagella across
unseen feces in dwindling woods.