Linger
This leapfrogging
from water-rotted trunk
to mud-clump
to trunk again is not easy.
As we tramp through this secluded graveyard of trees
I could tell you my autobiography
but am more content
with contemplating your jeaned hips instead.
They rise and fall in these woods
like twin half moons, linked yet distinct.
Despite all our tumbles
and the bramble that encloses us
you never lose track of that odd star,
which blazons
its independence from the hegemony
of our sun. Nor do I in keeping track of you. That star,
effulgent even against the most virile blue of the day,
shears through your viscera
to pierce the nowhere in your flesh
where you were taught your soul exists.
This is why
you often slide behind
the contorted torsi of trees
— Or at least the few thick black ones
still standing— You do this
to peer at it without being seen by it.
But we both sense how futility has settled
in this place like rust, in the husks
of thistle.
Our heels stick
in the toadstool glop
of this March earth. Not
satisfied with the roots
that already web it in a network of nerves,
it wants to make us hickory also
just like these gnarled and stooped pilgrims here.
Some, captive yet ascendent
over the soggy and lichenated bodies
of their fallen compatriots, bud with a vigor
only once remembered. Except for that one.
She is straight and strong. She raises her bony limbs
not in obsecration, but in cruel praise.
From the way you hesitate on that rock,
your hands in fistfuls of branches,
I know that suddenly you also realize this.
You fear that that star will bring you to something
like this end too.
I know. We cannot linger.
Go ahead. I'll still follow. And the grass that swaddles your feet,
wasted by winter, is the damp hair of the gorgon
but warmed in the sun.