Nature Poem

by Tommy Pico

Read the automated transcript.

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

Excerpt from NATURE POEM by Tommy Pico, copyright © 2016 Tin House Books. Used by permission of Tin House Books.