The Trail

1.
The sound of traffic slowly fades away
as he trudges up the steepening traprock trail
through hickory, hemlock, oak and birch, away
from all the human hubbub. On the way,
heavenward, new birth reflects the light
born in the sun’s core to make its way
past Mercury and Venus all the way
through the breezes of the earth, at last to run
into a bud or berry. He catches the run
of river water somewhere far away,
still cold; and even farther, he can hear
the frenzied fifes of an army of peepers. Here

2.
stand vernal pools galore. But who will hear
their chorus in a week? Like breakaway 
forest furniture when knocked, down here,
polychromatic turkey tails adhere
to a log, feeding the beings edging the trail. 
He stops and, placing his fingers on it, here,
he feels the emptiness inside it. Here
the pulp collapses even with a light
and gentle nudge. A little impolite,
he peers through a hollow place. Now he can hear
a horntail buzz. The log is overrun
with rapid ants. He wants to cut and run

3.
as if they craved his flesh. Can he outrun
the transience that forever will inhere
to forests and to worlds? Can he outrun
the swelling universe? In the long run
its galaxies will be so far away
from one another, chaos will make it run
quite out of heat. There will be no rerun.
With that, he leaves the log, as this portrayal,
this wintry view, dissolves like a vapor trail
above this range of rusted rock. Now the run
of water noise is near. The woods, alight
with birdcalls, makes his mind’s remarks seem light

4.
as April wind. While a chittering socialite
rings his ears with airs, and chipmunks run
across the path, his thoughts converge and light
upon a former love, a girl with light-
brown hair down in the valley. He can hear
her voice: a meadow brook. When candlelight
revealed her eyes it seemed that, in that light,
he suddenly became a castaway.
In the atoll of her soul nothing could weigh
him down, a basking bluebird in sunlight.
Will he escape the black flies of betrayal?
How can he flee the bloodhound on his trail?

5.
His dog, as hoary as the hills, must trail
behind him now. Her paws, no longer light
as moonbeams, cannot lope along the trail
as they once did. She wanders off the trail
to lap some of what never fails to run
toward the sea, creating its own trail
through any landscape, intersecting trail
or plunging over cliff. Now he can hear
the white noise of a waterfall and, here,
the screeches of the jays along the trail,
extinguished by the roaring waterway,
their racket as remote as the freeway.

6.
The day is going down. He makes his way
still farther up. Then when he starts to hear
low-trilling crickets, he will have the run
of the ridge. White Venus, in the fading light,
will show him there was never any trail.