just before dropping
off to sleep
it feels as if I’m on the edge
of something vast and spacious
sunlight concentrated
until it’s thick as honey
and woven into nets
strong enough for boulders
the periglacial erratic
hunkered down by the parking area
the steel towers of babble
drawing us to something like a peak
let me retrace my steps
later in a dream
the ground’s fine figure
felt through moccasin soles
no longer stumbling over
hard syllables of quartzite
lingering to savor
the round vowels of mud
***
I bend down to pat some torn-up
moss back into place
straighten up and can’t recall who I am
for a half-second of bliss
the wind drops a small branch
six feet away
a black-and-white warbler
keeps chanting is it? is it? is it?
my eye drifts up to a vulture
rocking back and forth
pale field of boulders here
snowbanks of laurel there
a common yellowthroat answered
by a chestnut-sided warbler
at each boulder field a view
in each view more of the boreal bog
where a high and lonesome glacier
once bled out
***
my feet sink into a carpet
of tiny staminate cones of white pine
I eat a few—a pineyness
that keeps me company for miles
as my eyelids droop under the weight
of a nap not taken
here’s an oak that couldn’t decide
which route to take to the sky
I stop as I always do
to snap its picture
a black ant crosses the path
on a path visible only to antennae
now I am watching my steps
as never before
rocks shift
pine needles slide
shadows shapeshift in the wind
and merge into one
***
I take a wrong turn
and a mosquito lets me know
backtrack to the windy ridgetop
the sunlit meadows of lichen
the trees are starting to make sense
the way they bow to each other
as the sun comes out and goes in
on my favorite trailside birch
I watch it go from Ariel
to pure Caliban
when the sun goes in
the forest photographer smiles
when the sun comes out
the 56-year-old child cheers
these reveries feel illicit among
so many official spots for reverie
but there are thoughts
that don’t fit into vistas
but have room to spare
in the openings between trees
***
a trough through the rocks
where trail volunteers must’ve tried
to get to the bottom of it
on bare scree my switch to thin soles
has taken me from stompy and confident
to slightly terrified
and it is probably way past time
for me to become
an old man with a stick
as I pick my way
over Indian Wells
which are neither
my feet only know
what to do with tree roots
their living resistance
at the edge of Big Flat
where kids still come
to get stoned and laid
a charcoal hearth from the 1820s
now hosts a great pile
of campfire charcoal
***
these mountains shaken down
for a hundred thousand winters
though never under
an ice sheet
lost their stone Mohawks
while remaining entirely unpolished
then boom! the charcoal iron
boom! the lumbering
the American chestnut blight
the spongy moth caterpillars
but mountain laurel and blueberries
thrive in all that sun
so that’s what people come for now
that and the view
as every hungry artist knows
they’re not here to see you
but what they can see from you
a viewpoint they will name after you
your vast quarry
on which we feed
even now a rocky spine
is breaking through
***
I walk down to Keith Spring
it’s clear to the bottom of the sky
and chanted over
by two warblers
black-throated green
black-throated blue
there’s little trace of the camp site
where Andy saw the bear
and I took off running after it
desperate to measure my fear against it
a camp site I established myself
is now a sun-blasted opening
I don’t tread lightly
even here
***
the trail descends through spruce
planted by the CCC crews
and then the tall bracken
and my thin sisters
the mosquitoes with whom
I am bonded by blood
the trail ends without ending
and I take a last look
plump white mounds of laurel
visited by capricious swallowtails
Indian cucumber root flowers
like hidden winged stars
oak leaves turned holey
by god’s own caterpillars
and the companionable silence
of so many unplanted trees
when I circle back
past the spring
a hermit thrush is singing
just upslope
from notes written while walking the Tom Thwaites Footpath section of the Mid-State Trail
June 18, 2022