Archive
03/13/12 - (5)
Glorious
Four o'clock in the afternoon is a glorious interlude For me to be trudging over the leaf-and-pine-needle floor of a woods, Especially when I have to order my booted feet To navigate sporadic patches of unmelted snow and pools of slush — Half ice, half water, soon to flow down to the frozen lake — And feel them respond, to the commands of a seventy-year-old, As adroitly as they did when I hiked the Superior National Forest Back in my teenage summers of the fifties, with the skill of a voyageur, Adoring the outdoors as if I were born in its glorious womb.
How glorious it is, to be still so trim, so vigorously self-disciplined, To have power walked, before noon, through the village streets, And, now, for yet another rigorous hour and a half of exercise, To be traipsing amidst the dense labyrinth of wintering trees, Listening to the shadowy silence the trunks, limbs, and twigs whisper Among themselves and the earth and sky, as well as to me, Letting me know that I'm not only welcome, appreciated, known But, more essential, that I belong with them, am one of them, In the tranquillity embracing each of us, in this glorious moment.
03/13/12 - (5)
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