Lavender Water

Lavender Water

Above all, be alone with it all,

a hiving off, a corner of silence

amidst the noise, refuse to talk,

even to yourself, and stay in this place

until the current of the story

is strong enough to float you out.

                                                                David Whyte

                                                                Coleman’s Bed

The length of time something sits, once

all mixed and stirred and beaten in things

are poured and contained in the shape

it may be condemned in, years

maybe and then have need of it

and more awfully, have faith it is

all the same and no change what-so-

ever is possible and maybe the need

is a stumbled on thing, a minor

injury calling for a remedy, a dot

of that ointment my friend spent

an entire summer growing and feeding

and tending with her own

breath until the day it was cut

down to be what it was always

intended for: ointment.  Today

I opened, not it, but something like it,

upside down and it was like the day

my water broke: just a few drops

of a clear stain and I thought

it’s not time it’s not now I’m alone

I’m not enough I’m far away and in public

a restroom too small for me but I watched

the blotch spread clean and become

gone, absorbed, and then a wrinkle

in that thin barrier a cotton crotch

is and misunderstood my body not

for the first time and though listen

just get me all the way home

and I did and we both stayed close

for days even under the lip of the cliff

of blankets and fever we’d almost reached

the top of and later the scar

would remind me of a grassy mouth

and it weeped clean puss and my friend

sent a jar of ointment she’d made

and I covered my staples wit it

until they shone.  It was more

than enough for what I needed so I kept

it and sometimes when I would cut myself

I would remember it and try to

find the safe place I’d put it nearby

but it was years, yesterday, and today

I had an insignificant need, a cut

on the end of my thumb and again I was in all

about sealing it shut such small

pains are distracting and cowardly

but I reached for something and opening

it, it bled a rancid water not unlike

her formula of Jojoba, Orange Flower,

Chamomile, Lavender and Cucumber

all over the page I’d been too distracted

to close and funny how I was thirteen

years ago walking then sitting as I watched

the water spread, funnily enough under

a poem called “The Seven Streams” and he’s

telling me everything

I need to do to come out of it

clean: “Come down drenched…

with the cold rain so far into your bones

that nothing will warm you…” and all

this time the water of my life is

pouring out of itself after those years

on a shelf are reached for and settled on.

Beforehand

south lubec

Beforehand

It’s dark but they say you are coming it’s dark but they say you're

already here

but lightly yet like my newborn who blinks out the bright light and touches

my face

with his fist because it’s all he knows curled up in the dark like he was

all those months

quiet sometimes while my body made a walking cradle until I lay me down

to sleep

and then his fist would rise up across my belly all the way across and it’s

the first time

we’ve ever seen him alive the mould of him moving through

every layer

of skin and blood and membrane and the ark of the sun was

moving through

the sky of my womb and he was in there and he was quiet

and other-

wise growing and the dark meant nothing was wrong even though

both of us

knew it would be a long time through once the snow started

to fall

lightly at first, a drop of white paint on a red canvas how it spread

through

and each arm of it was pointed and bolder more

at the tips

though the middle was where it was the strongest, where it was

the heaviest

where it gathered all it was and is and could be into the bowl of the

trebuchet

and waited as the lever was pulled back, back, back, and

let go

OUI/ICU

OUI/ICU

Innocence is what we allow

to be gifted back to us

once we’ve given ourselves away.

                                                                                Ten Years Later

                                                                                David Whyte

While I slept you drank and then

you slept too and sometime in the night

we met we must’ve I took off

your shoe the left one first I always stared

there and then the next one

and you let me but only when you drank

and it was not as toxic as memory

would make it you came back into

your body from wherever it was you went

when you began

to drink while we were at school and your

husband was away and sometimes you drove

and one time collided head-

on trying to navigate that tight inside S

(but now that I think about it I think maybe

you were on your way

home so that meant you were not on the inside

or weren’t supposed to be) and maybe she's
the one who drifted maybe she did no one knows

or ever will but you went into her grill

and she went into the wind-

shield because who then ever considered

seat-belts it was you and her the most

intimate you’d ever let yourself get

with another woman

and you don’t count me you don’t

coming home from school putting you to bed

on the couch

then set to peel potatoes to wash and boil

and bring a bit of fat to the heat and let the meat

fry crusty the way you liked it

when you were awake when you could make

drunk look right

at home and we’d sit down to the supper

I’d made and you’d touch your face

and the gauze and your ribs and the bruises

and your broke open knee

what you’d said hit the dash maybe the same

time her head hit the glass

and you were both over and under

one another exploding the whole town

and the whole island in gossip while we ate and waited

or while we watched TV and waited

or while we were in school and waited

and nobody told us we’d be alone for a while

or maybe somebody did they thought to

check in to make sure the beds were clean

and supper was put away and say maybe

they’d let you stay in the hospital all the way through

to Monday maybe they’d discharge you

after the weekend if you had a ride home

if someone could go

and get you and help you

with your shoes while you slept while I slept

and you drank and drank

even after that accident

and the next one that took you over the steep

bank you never stopped falling you never stopped

After Sappho

before sunrise
the cairns
green point
west quoddy head

After Sappho

Like the sweet apple which reddens upon the topmost bough, 

Atop on the topmost twig, — which the pluckers forgot, somehow, — 

Forget it not, nay; but got it not, for none could get it till now. 

                                                                                                                Sappho

                                                                                                                One Girl 

You come upon it slow I suppose,

the knowing: it unbuttons unzips unfastens unties

the night or day or any hour you take

your pleasure in, this pleasure, of letting

a hand touch you and not be appalled

it’d go all the way to the back and warm

itself as though over a low stove-stone

in the middle of the woods where she’d been gathering

the medicine for the puncture and in fact you’d met

in that woods because now that you were old

enough to heal yourself you set out shoeless

and without a map and only on an instinct and a strong

lung and thigh to climb the almost bald

places left smooth by glaciers and rain

and thousands of hands and feet and pain

and more than that but who would guess unless

meeting unless letting the words once hardening

in the kiln under your tongue and sent

a storehouse a corn-crib a setting cask singed

and soaked would say ok who would know you’d go

years and years into the wilderness of cut

lovers or no it’s taken this long to say

they weren’t lovers they were men who made you

afraid they preyed for you it’s what they did

and what small prey can know from day to day

to day this is the day he’ll take you up and at that point

it’s all lost and after he’s pulling out

the best of you to throw like used lube oil

before the match he’ll laugh and you’ll crack

and scatter like her Fragments: painted

on hard clay shards, you know her: Sappho

and be nothing like her or will you, yes! exactly!

turning like this verse is, to the one who reaches

to touch to heal the leaky fistula and say ok yes let's
do this first

and you say thank you, yes, it’s just simply I want to 

be asked.

String

String

Let my history then

be a gate unfastened

to a new life

and not a barrier

to my becoming.

                                                David Whyte                                     

                                                “Yorkshire”

I’m waiting for the wind to die

and not so much

as that as waiting

for the temperature to rise

for what they say will make

freezing bearable. 

Unprepared,

I left my boots out in the cold

on the porch when I came in

from the storm

yesterday and while

they’re dry

they’re stiff as a boy

on his first ice fishing trip

and I think this

is the reason for the string

through the shoulders

of the coat and down

the arm that stops,

abrupt at the cuff: who,

standing over the new

augured hole in the ice God

knows how many miles

from home

wants to watch

one mitten fall into the black

round face of a wet full moon?

Who wouldn’t pull

their hand

into what’s left of the sleeve

and swear and stare and want

to abandon all the hope and gear

and grope toe over toe

the hell out of there and pray

to stay upright through

the snow: foot to foot to foot

not traipse but walk straight

to cold to light a smoke

while watching the sun glow

and grow short and shorter still

on the road.  I’d’ve given the mitten

another thought or two.  I’d’ve

even cursed it.  But shit,

what I wouldn’t give

for one string and two mittens

to get me through a day

maybe a small mouth bass

coming up to the hook

to touch her lip to the shiny

light in the dark, blood cold bu

enough warm

under all this ceaseless blowing

wind and sheer thumb

dropping cold.

Hat

mother ann's rocking chair
fruitlands museum
harvard, massachusettes 

Hat

As they say,

all faults contained here

are my own

                                                Elizabeth Alexander

                                                The Light of the World

That last day you came through

the door you were wearing the hat

you always wore or

at least a hat and out

doors I never saw you

without one.  But you’d come in

to visit to have tea to stay

for dinner and make your way

into your lives like a blind

wise man shining a light

you yourself could never,
ironically, be guided by

though I’m not sure why.

Ghosts you’d once told me
though I don't think you used
that word.  Maybe you said
once you thought you were
crazy and it hung on you like
a fug though I don't know you
used either of those words
either.

Standing tall as anyone

I’d ever known you bent

your head and took the hat

into your hand and rolled it,

unrolled it rolled it unrolled it

and hung it on the top

of the door where it would stay

for the next two years

and everyone then who’d drop by

would walk under the umbra

of it depending on the day

because that door faced west

mostly, though it opened

north and everyone who wanted

a word with me or my father

would have to walk in from there

with the wind that blew

gravel and stray sand and I swear

it got into everything
the cupboards the plates

and set rings under the jars

of pickles and settled right up into

the corner of the stairs to stay

the way you would and take up

the day wherever it was

wherever you’d left it off.  And you’d

talk a talk that would take her time

meaning something, but eventually

it would and I’d know it, mostly,

unless I was distracted

which was mostly, by the kids

you’d come to see and praise

or the tea you’d taught me about

how you took it though today

I couldn’t say: sugar?  cream?

one bag or two?

And you left that day

without your hat and I never did

notice right away and later on
on the phone

when I’d driven back home

you’d ask and I said no

and you’d say ok and we both believed

it.  It wasn’t until I was

back those too few weeks

in the summer that I would look

up on the edge of that door

and there it was and those two years

of dust because I never saw you

there that last summer, at the house

I mean, I saw  you, just not there

at the house, it was always out

at the boat ramp say or in

your car on the road and you’d

wave or if you were sitting

idle looking at gulls you’d

invite yourself to tea

but you never made it

down and I’d never see you

again, not ever, because something

must’ve delayed either you

or me those days and the summer

was done

and that was that.  You died

the day after Christmas

in a cold car your wife was warming

after you’d felt under the weather but refused

the ambulance.  You’d said you didn’t

need it.  I wonder: was your head

covered?  I know it’s not

important, it’s just I’d like to

remember that while everything was

letting go inside of you that there was

something in some way staying

upright because I’ve got this thing lately

about keeping it all in

under a warm enough head:

if I’m warm enough I won't be distracted

if I’m warm enough I won’t lose my mind

if I’m warm enough I won’t squander

                                the only time we have; I’d be

able to look at everything full on,

even your dying, the snow

on your boots melting in the under the glove-

box heater, and a great warmth under your skin

taking its time fading.  And that hat, still

on that door, waiting for you

to head in.

A B(roke)n Heart

A B(roke)n Heart

                                                --imagine

we could mend

whatever we heard fracture:

splintering of wood, a bird’s

cry over still water, a sound

only reaching us now.

               

                                                Fragment 2

                                                Kathleen Jamie

while you are fogged in and dying you are sorting through 

all the seeds you've been finding and drying almost your entire 

life: idle in their spaces until now, sometimes for years and years

between moves, they stay at rest, like a sat horse

and rider come up to the top of some vista and out

goes their breath and over the edge and into

every entire thing, every future every past stem and root.

Just looking and breathing before the long

journey on.  I tell myself not to look into all that

space, I know exactly what gives me vertigo, like hiking

too close to the wall on one side of me and the cleaver

edge on the other and shit if it isn’t cliché

to say don’t look down or don’t look straight up but

how the fuck am I going to know where

I put my toe if I don’t at least…but that’s not

the same kind of vertigo as lying next to someone

who’s about to die and you don’t know they are

and they’re just on the corner of waking up because the snow’s been

falling and it needs to be pushed out of the way or scooped

and carried to the other side of the drive, and while

it’s being carried, all that weight of all the weightless flakes,

one on one on one, becomes like the taking

of all your treasured goods and holding them on through

the long memory of acquisition to sending them

to the children of a close friend and imagine them

opening their boxes, all the treasures you’d hunted for

and saved all those years and finally deciding: after your surgery:

after your heart bungie jumped: a month after watching

your lover fall in the snow by the edge of the road

and you’d known as you watched him

fall it was unrecoverable, your muscles stiffened

and you sat the mare of your own bulging pump on the edge,

mare raging at her bridled and reined in mouth

and called in the calm shock of someone

who has just been robbed of everything: I think                 

he’s dead, and yes that’s almost exactly how it went.

I’ve read about failed or broken vital organs: hearts

and livers and lungs.  Kidneys.  I imagine how they make

the inner landscape a home we could never live in-

side of unless we were dying, I mean, think about it,

we are always living outside, even when we eat

it’s all hand to mouth, it’s all morsel on the tongue

gnashed and swallowed into the dark but we’re still

outside of it, until we fall down dying, because

that all happens on the inside.  Seed after seed, sight

and sound, after, if you’ve saved some time for it,

all the neckties, idle for throats, after all the art

pieces, after all the pause music…right?  all it takes

is the living to lift it out of the sent box shortly after

it arrives, after it’s been packed and shipped,

after it’s been carried up the icy path and dropped

or nearly so, and is caught just before the door

lets go and hits me, though not hard, tight spring it has

always been, hissing, or just exhaling, but warning me first,

letting me brace for it before I let go and let it fall.

Ex

Ex—

After a Dream

Now you who hesitate,

fearful of the tomb-smell,

fearful of shades,

look up—higher!

                                Kathleen Jamie

                                Swifts

It’s not every day

but often enough

I admonish myself

how much better

I could be if: if it

weren’t winter I’d walk

along the river, but once

I fell there on the ice

and gashed my lip

and felt myself

slip down the small

cliff toward

the river.  Nothing

to grab to I just

let myself go

and when I was done

falling laid my cheek

willingly this time

against a stone.  Funny

how something like 

what makes us makes us feel

like home, no?  And though

it wasn’t the one

I slipped on trying

to negotiate the terrain

I had no business being

on with balding old

boots it was one just

like it and it was icy

and cool against my

chagrinned bloody

face.  It's made me

hesitate ever since.  How

one misstep after going

along and going along

and carefully too, don’t

be fooled, I wasn’t coming

on hell bent for leather

I was careful, I was smooth

and fluid like I’d wanted

to be in the woods, I was.

I was.  Right?  You saw me?

You did, I know, your back

wasn’t turned when I went

down.  You watched me. 

When I looked up though

you’d walked on ahead

and were watching

the river instead.  How

even in winter it foamed

in the head of it, all that

push from the woods

after a freak February warm

spell.  Shit.  Anybody

can fall.  Anybody.  If they

lean the way I did they’re sure

to dip the way I did, too far

one way and all that

confidence slipped, slow

at first, but enough.

And it bit me in the cheek

as I went down.  And I stayed

down long enough to see

you walk past the boulder

some glacial fist thrust

there who knows

how long ago.  It was

hands and hands taller

than the both of us.  It

squatted on the top

of the bank and seemed

to smirk, there was that one

fissure, at the coming, the

going of the water, 

the weather, the walkers.

All of it.  Not unfriendly,

just honest.  And a bit of moss

on its undercarriage.  Soft

when I tore some and pressed

it against my lip.  Bitter

but not unpleasant.

Thumb

behind faneuil hall
boston

Thumb

Even love must pass through loneliness,

the husbandman become again

the Long Hunter…

                                He can no longer be at home

he cannot return, unless he begin

the circle that first will carry him away.

                                                                                Wendell Berry

                                                                                “Setting Out”

Truth is, it’s small enough a start to not have to let it

bother me at all and it’s in a spot so

unnoticeable when I wince against the pressure

I thnk it should not be allowed, should not be such a great pain

at all, look, it’s just the corner and the tip

of my thumb and what is it required

to do really but grip and balance and listen I can adjust

my life enough to not require it—hold

my button on the other side of my thumb, roll

it through the eyehole the way I used to

when I was still learning buttons—and while it might

fumble through, soon enough it’s settled

and the scab is still set and bent on its own

healing almost ready to be ignored completely

the way it is all through the dark slowly slowly

closing and needing only time, a few more hours really

before the soft skin closes over and won’t give

way again.  I’m thinking like it’s two

people constantly together and something, a stiff

wind maybe and a little friction

without the grease makes the heat and the miniature

pain and going out briefly

to start the car in the cold and we think

nothing of it and the day is a ride in a warm

enough place and our hands are busy on the wheel

and our lips are busy in our thinking to settle them

on all those places they haven’t settled in

for a long long time and we think I’ll touch him

this way I’ll touch him this way, a whole list of this

ways and we’ll draw our course with one thumb

first over the charts and maps of our day and calculate

the miles and the windspeed and span our pinky and thumb

like a compass and see, then, the thin rise of blood

and almost almost almost (listen, it’s nothing we can still

make love, and he’ll touch his tongue to it) and the start

of it is a blot on the spot in the sea I’d hoped to meet

him in and it’s enough of the truth of it right now,

even though it’s a small such, a small enough, pain,

its distracting as a lit matchhead enough just blown on

to pull me off course and take a different wind, waiting

for it to rise up, waiting for its hot companion tongue

and cheek to die down to closure.

Stepping Off

Stepping Off

Despite these attractions, the island is deserted,

and the tiny footmarks seen along the shores

all point towards the sea.

                                                                Wislawa Szymborska

                                                                Utopia 

It was friendship we were getting at

how those among us make it

as though it was the very stair

we stood on to keep us

from falling into the gorge.  There are times

we step off and just like that, it's a

Wiley Coyote moment and we are shocked

at the vertigo that comes 

quiet naturally, by whatever force

it is that balls up

gravity and shoves it

into the hole in our spine all the way through

to the bottom

of our voice box, that place

were sound is made and stoked

starting like the laying down

on a cold firestone all the dry devices

we could find in our daily lives.  And lighting it’s
the only thing left to do.  Maybe we turn

to grope for the stair

and strike the match instead and we let go

and fall up with the fire and

the specks of tinder and that

only when the flame’s taken

our socks and shoes and licked them

with their spikey wild tiger tongue

lifting the skin back to open our whole

closed world to a shade of red

we’d always carried inside our purse

of skin but never opened, not that way, not even

cutting not even with surgery or a burn

falling into all that pressure of space

it’s like that it truly is right? and all that time

spent building the stair and maybe

another one and another one and some

may choose ladders and some may choose

rope and listen it doesn’t really matter,

does it? in the end because there’s that

moment we are nothing and even

in between that moment, before we know

we’re falling, just as we’ve stepped off

                                                                (or been shoved)

everything that’s solid we are, and we are completely

blank with its bliss, like the moment we’re

born, thoughtless as rocks tossed one by one

by one over the shoulder of the first

responder rushing to

the cave-in at the shaft we’d fallen

into, the mosaic they’re making with all that

tossing ignored and why

shouldn’t it be, because the real job’s at the mouth

then starting down, in the entry-way of the mine

or the boat that’s just sunk on her starboard

side, wheelhouse against the struck ledge,

what dislodged the stair but who could’ve seen it

climbing like we do, each stair we’ve ever made.

The Sound of Opening a Fist

The Sound of Opening a Fist

And now this

other parallel…

the troubled lives

all calling for the one…

unspoken wish

to be held

and made one

                             David Whyte

                             New Year Prayer

After all this time I’m just now seeing it considering

it: how can one receive a gift with a fist

of a heart with the knuckles up and out

and the thumb closed over the curled bird

of the hand always ready to be (or if not

ready, anticipating) flushed out by the dogs

who stand and point and their one paw

raised off the ground the way they were trained

to do.  My father kept bird dogs but he never

ran them, and he kept rabbit dogs but he never

ran them either.  And I think of all the ducks

some guys shoot dead that fall into the pond

how they send the red or black retriever

into the cold winter water.  Or all the indigo-

ring necks of the pheasants hunched under

the brush and the hound that waits and waits

or the beagle who comes back to the hutch

and the two kept rabbits and once the unrun

in him is off his chain he makes straight for them.,

curled as they were behind the flimsy chicken-

wire hutch.  They cried like newborns

and then, when he was done and had enough

of shaking them dead, he ran to the mouth

of the old logging road and was gone

for days and days and days a perpetual bullet

even the police called about, sighting him after

he’d been with a pack of other loose dogs running

deer.   When he was caught again and then got loose

and shook all those chickens to death that one

Christmas morning my father’d had enough

and when he came in the house after

shooting the dog we were expected to carry on

playing with our new toys.  And it’s now

I appreciate I got a plush Snoopy who clutched

his Woodstock bird in a long Velcro-closing hug

and after that morning I took them everywhere

and sniffed them and sometimes took the bird

out of the dog’s arms just for a moment and put

my own fist in there and opened it but only there

safe inside the white benign paws of a toy

and only then in the dark and only then when

the bird I held in my other hand was close enough,

was still but not trembling in the thick brush,

would join us.

This January Day 2018

This January Day 2018

Rain.

Rain and nearly

60 degrees          !!!  when

a week ago it was thirteen below zero

and now there are late April

pools on the blond lawn

and mud.   A friend

of mine

who died

the day after Christmas

who was                              was?

                          is

inside a vault

of ash

is being asked

to wait until spring to get back

               

                                no, that’s not how

                                I want to

                                say it

the ground’s been

rock solid since before Thanksgiving

and now this

freakish sauna

has opened the mouth

of the cemetery with a moan.  He could  go

and not have

to wait till

May

everything's completely

bare

where last Saturday into Sunday

into Monday

it was 30 plus

inches of snow

What’s becoming

of us?  What

are we

supposed to rely on

(not any more that staunch man)

and the / or the

come Sunday there’ll be a drastic change in the weather

what?

???

I can’t even wrap

my hand around

myself

or grasp

his

or

even know what to reach

for in the dark morning

before I take

the kids to school:

                                                wool and a shovel?

                                                rubber boots and an umbrella?

And a grave (what?
)
yet

to be dug...

After Seeing Venus

After Seeing Venus

I don’t know how much you saw of it the day you drove through

the morning to visit my apartment

and all the scattered

charcoal and bits

of rags I used to wipe my hands clean

as if I didn’t have enough to wash,

spaces my hair and face

places days later I’d see the Ash

Wednesday dot on my neck under my ear.  You’d said you wanted

a hat a certain kind of hat and I thought

I saw one once in a shop so I said

and you drove down to meet me.  I think

the cliché is going off

the deep end and your ruse was a tweed

Irish hat and when you arrived

you were sore for a while all those hours of sitting

and changing lanes from rural to highway

and maybe you’d come just to talk rather than save me

but I caught you by the eye

or an eye on the drawing on the easel of the woman

headless

armless

on one side to the shoulder on the other just above the elbow

and you didn’t make a sound you didn’t

only said very calm after a breath blown out

or not blown really

but eased the way a tire’s eased by a little prick

and we can drive on for weeks and not know a thing

and you said well she can’t resist can she

                                not being able to

                                see or put out

                                her hands

and right then I wanted you

to stand next to her and rub her

out, with the great flat span of your hands

smear where her neck ended into empty space

where a bird might

find a purchase

and deliver all his shit

down her back I wanted you

to throw up your hands

and run

to get them, and after more arrive

while you watch

run them off them off too with a shout

and love me back

from all that stone.  You’d found me

alive and maybe that was enough

for you.  You didn’t look at the woman again

in fact you kept your back to her

and while you sipped your tea

you said everything to me but what
he'd said later

you’d come all that way to say:

                               

                                I want to take you

                                                to bed let me

                                                this once

                                                touch you there so you’ll remember it

                                                like it was

                                                love

but the easel

but the dark smear on my cheek,

the one that couldn’t be

rubbed off

and that’s were you touched

and the other places on my body that were still whole:

                and you were brief

                and the next day after you’d left

                I started

                painting her breasts

                and I thought don’t they

                look fabulous

                just as you must’ve

                imagined them.

Of Family: Atonement

Of Family: Atonement

Once we were one

and now we are two

and the second has grown

and forgotten the first

                                David Whyte

                                Remember

We had, after all, climbed the same mountain,

hadn’t we?  and sometimes on the same path,

and resting and going on at the same pace.

Looking back I’m not even sure how we became

separated and continued to walk on our own

and sadly I can’t even say we missed each other

only maybe when we pass in a particular season

now we may look straight ahead and not recognize

each other, we may even look at our feet

if we do and rarely because there are so many

different ways to make it.  Or we may stop and share

a bottle of water, a brief story, all the while scanning

the sky for the imminent inclement weather.  We don’t

stay long and we don’t make much out of each other’s

leaving, indeed we simply walk away old strangers

at a train station say, waiting for our time to be

called.  Or maybe we are waiting like father’s

and daughters at the loading zone, bags in the belly

of the plane and the lights and the fuel and all the rest

checked for a safe and regular landing, never

discussing the time it will take to fly or land or to sit beside

other strangers making their way, how they’ll smile

or doze or look away or become the size of their seats

and be pleased at landing and be the first to disembark.

You and me and all that shrubbery, all that rock we negotiate

alone walking and talking to ourselves and our all-but-ripping-

apart boots we walk and walk away in and not knowing if it’s

the family we left behind who don’t recognize us

or if it’s simply the altitude of the summit that’s left us

lightheaded and short of breath, that top we gained

again after breaking new ground, a new road where

there wasn’t one, passing no one this time, or if we did

not knowing it or hearing it, not seeing it and not feeling

it, or anything, but the weight of the pack, the chafe

of the straps, the first signs of a rainout against the face

of another peak in the range and getting closer

but who knows, not a stranger in these parts this time

of year, if it will make it this far or if another still

unborne wind will be rubbed like static and push itself north

and still north, or south, maybe south, it’s hard

to say being alone on the bald stone of the top waiting

for them to arrive like they promised they would.