Poem

Waterfall

I went searching in the forest of red pines,

And soon strayed off the bridle trail,

All wet, muddied, horse-worn.

I veered off into the frozen matting

Of quilted ferns and leaves.

My boots made a sound of a fist clenching in leather gloves

As my mind conjured its own path through the leaning trees.

Along the way I came upon a lone conifer seedling

Frail and wobbly in the undergrowth.

Who am I? I asked it.

I’ll never see the day when
This little guy joins the canopy.

As my grandparents missed my degrees,

My marriages, my fatherhood, my now.

I am this little tree
In all its fragile immediacy.

I am its regal swaying pine

That I won’t survive to ever see.

The paths I envision always lead to the river.

I pick my way carefully to the very edge

Of a craggy cliff overlooking the rushing water

Swollen with snow melt and recent rain;

A roar of jailhouse escape,

Trench war slaughter.

I sink my boots into the earth

Slippery with pine needles and ice

And then lean out, stanchioned against a thick belly of bark.

Desire must be like the river

That wends its way downhill,

Careening over rocky declivities,

Metamorphosing into an icy waterfall

Which reveals a sudden extraordinary beauty,

A terrifying thunderous violence

That punishes the sharp stone smooth

And leaves behind a treacherous slide

Before the churn and froth coalesces into a river again.

All so the water can get where it thinks it needs to go.

But that’s not exactly my path.
I've gone as far as I can, for I lose my way

When faced with a looming void.

I back away from the edge and return again to the forest,

Scanning the matrix of trees, patiently waiting

For the winding lanes to reappear

So I can begin the slow, dogged,

Always ad-libbed, return back home.

12/30/20