Mid-September Walk in the Wilderness

I walk to raise my heart rate
and my mood. To count my steps
I wear a wireless wellness monitor –
it’s called a Fitbit.

     (I didn’t want to go.
     Glued to my chair and screen
     I’d rather keep on playing,
     addicted as I am
     to Solitaire and constant
     buzz of broadcast news.
     I disapprove
     of these bad habits.
     I should be more productive.)

Success: my shoes are on,
the door is shut behind me
and halfway up the hill
I start to see
the trees and hear
the curving cries of jays
proclaiming autumn’s onset.

I take the path into the woods,
the so-called Wilderness.
Shadows are long
this time of year,
no matter if you start out early.
And it’s already late today.
But still the light is clear
and shining through the branches.

A surge of pleasure –
looking up I’m blown away
by lacy majesty
and overpowering grace.
And straight ahead
and on all sides
more mystery and treasure –
gazing through
each stand of growth,
I can discern
another and another,
in ever greater depth –
     layer on layer
     behind beyond –
revealing through the woods
endless swaths of pattern.

As in your life
the past remains
and glimmers through:
deep structure of your being.
I’m in the moment now
and yet each step reminds
of other times and places.
Dead trees among the living
point bony fingers
raise arms in stark reproach
or is it mute beseeching?

Enchanted hour before the dusk:
the woods are full of birds’ last fling,
a sudden flash of red –
bright cardinal streaks across –
the silent heavy gliding of a mammoth hawk
tracing prey below,
a crow’s harsh call,
a robin flits from branch to rock.
And I’m immersed in sight and sound.

Constancy and change:
the comfort of the known,
delight in new revealing.
And so each changing season
gives hints of glory passing.
Days of warmth are numbered
Leaves still green and lush –
how long before they turn
and fall?

Deeper in the woods I see
gigantic boulders pushing up,
outcroppings of a pre-jurassic time.
Droppings of retreating glaciers
long before the current melts
which threaten polar bears
and the Greenland shelf?
Or layered under water in
a clast-filled marine bowl?

Roxbury Puddingstone –
pebbles and cobbles protrude
from rich conglomerate,
apparently formed 600 million years
ago or so,
before the plants or animals
came to earth –
yet the boulders are visible still.

Here dark and bold against the sky,
there green and covered with scale
or cracked and riven,
draped in vine, with grasses
spurting from a widening split.
“Rock of Ages, cleft for me,
Let me hide myself in thee.”
Favored hymn of my mother,
it comes to me now,
walking alone
feeling small
and quite finite,
yet one with the world all around.