The Mosherville Road

If a man wishes to be sure

of the road he treads on, he

must close his eyes and walk

in the dark.

St. John of the Cross

It is nowhere so dark

as in the country

where I was born.

I remember nights

I held my hand

an inch from my eyes

and saw nothing.

Yet I kept putting one

foot in front of the other

and don’t recall ever falling

into the ditch,

though I was so aware

of it, three feet deep,

on both sides of me

with gravel walls

and filthy water

at the bottom of it,

that it seems to me now

I must have gone into it,

at least once

and forgotten. There was glass

from broken bottles

and everything else

that gets thrown from cars

in that ditch and thorn bushes grew

on the opposite side of it,

and there were trees

and night birds

and flying insects

I couldn’t see.

Usually I talked

to myself and sometimes I sang

as I stumbled along

and it wasn’t until tonight

almost twenty years

later I began to realize

how much I was afraid.