This day could be drawn in pencil it’s so drab.
The roads are wet with rain
and the leaves are down,
the birch with their spindly arms
and dragon eyes,
a tangle of dead leaves,
a lone bird…
this feeling of the trees
stripped down to the underlying form,
the self’s like that too,
unadorned.

Yet here in nature there is no wanting
for what we don’t have,
there only is.
The striations on the muddy path,
the tracks and ruts,
the ground is always like that,
always changing,
the same as us.

And I have come back to the trail to lose or to find myself in this season of soft color and low light.

I’ve come back to remember that I’m more than myself, I can let go of myself,
I can be a part of something bigger,
I never left.

And the lopped off limbs,
the blown down leaves,
all this is a part of me.
The song of some awkward bird
the same as mine, off key.

And when I’m on the trail I’m connected in a real way,
a way I can see and feel.
Not by wavelengths or wires
but by the smell of the ground,
the roots and leaves, and all that is real.

I have come back to the trail to lose or to find myself but can’t decide, is the self something
to capture and to catch, or to set free?

I am bound and released by the weight of this, with nowhere else to go but here, no one else to be but me.

Categories: identity, poetry

Tags: poetry