Sultry, Summer breeze coasts gently,
Kissing the warm, cocooned forest lake,
Into rippling bliss,
Into living, surface reflections,
Of verdant, topsy-turvy perception.
Liquid, silver ribbons roll to shore,
In parallel synchrony,
Lulling the life on top and beneath,
Lulling the thriving microcosm world they feed,
Orchestrating restless thoughts in restless minds,
Into confluent melodies,
Primal music.
Heaven, this,
Heaven always

Read More Poems From The Adirondack Almanack HERE.

Back in the cabin after five wet days camping
five and a half miles back in these wildlands—

beside the long shifting beaver meadow kept open
since the loggers left their flooded “flowed land”

and its rotted log dam gave out soon afterward
—the pungency of wet wool drifts to the corners

of the front room as the fresh fire kicks up
when someone picks up your wet pack

whose surprising weight pulls them off balance
to tell us how what we don’t know while walking

can always come clear later like the brook trout’s
—you hope—first tentative tugs on your fly line

ground-truth the atavism of the limbic brain
to send you back to the city renewed

like Antaeus as maybe your father once said
while he taught you backpacking’s rudiments.

Read More Poems From The Adirondack Almanack HERE.

There is a forest that I return to
when I can’t get away from the pulsations
of thinking. A forest of tombs as still
as dead tree trunks and melodious as raindrops
on red pine needles. The paths of my ancestors.

In this forest, I am not alive like I usually am.
Stepping in mink tracks, I know this place in
my tendons like a ghost knows the temperature of
fog. Here, the Independence River runs like a lovely
ribbon until it pounds into a ravine of crumbling shale.

And I know that old hunger returning from vanished glaciers.

In this forest, my arms, as I meander, wave like prayer flags
hung out to the ragged border between life and death- a place
where I can survive outside the womb. A place where I can
become a wilderness dancer touching the mud softer than ivory.

Read More Poems From The Adirondack Almanack HERE.