Hard to tell if this is a path at all.
The only signpost I see, I can’t read.
——Below me lie fields of barley,
uptrail the rockface rears like a dragon’s back.
Green-glowing moss on the flagstones
———yields underfoot as I climb.
Peaks raise their heads through mist, and the trail
——switchbacks beyond the eye’s imagination.
One after another, how is it possible,
my former lives are wandering off,
some ascending the mountain
——to take up a higher residence.
Or they slip away unnoticed.
Lessons I learned, or should have learned,
pleasures that seemed at the time
——-—no more than my due,
stories that ended in tears or fury—
they become chapters in a different book.
——Friends for life,
those who were there for the good times,
——those who regret having ever met me.
Friends who tried to improve me,
compadres who knew me for who I was—
for them I become a memory.
I cross a bridge lashed with vines
swaying over the roar of a river,
——the water urgent below,
snow and fear in its molecules.
Part of me expects to find something at the end—
an inn, a hermitage,
a simple supper and a place to sleep.
The air vibrates with the low frequency of a bell.
Richard Tillinghast’s thirteenth book of poems, Blue If Only I Could Tell You, won the White Pine Press Poetry Prize in 2022. His most recent is Night Train to Memphis, also from White Pine. He lives in Hawaii in the winter and Tennessee in the summer.
Image: Konrad Koller. Unsplash, 2023.
