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.

Wild, is your nature,
Yet, in infinitely perfect
Balance.
There was a time,
When I might have taken you
For granted,
But never now,
Now, is when every minute with you,
Breaks my heart,
Both with my human transience,
And the permanence,
Of your beauty.
I cannot capture you,
Here, or
Ever.
I can only be,
In you,
As you are in me,
Here, and
Now.

Read More Poems From The Adirondack Almanack HERE.

During our own Tang Dynasty we stirred
space-age orange powder in hot water
on cold mornings beside Johns Brook
stomping our feet for warmth outside
the Howard Lean-to.

My bro Matt’s wife Ann wanted to take a dip
in the brook, more like a small river
here at the base of the high peaks.

For Matt it came down to “I will
if you do” and Ann did do.

Later we packed-out by the well-worn
trail we packed-in on, but by then
it was a different way.

Read More Poems From The Adirondack Almanack HERE.