from Home Fires (1997)
Our hike all done this perfect morning,
the trail extending its hand to receive us,
the mist in slow descent to our shoulders
like the smoke rings I begged from my grandfather
and his pack of Camels. We went the whole way up
Greenbrier, past the swept floor under hemlocks,
the feathery maidenhairs under poplar, past
the little graveyard, its stones as crusted as moles
on a stooped back—the babies borned and died
on the same day in 1890, in 1903, in 1910,
and the women who joined them
the next day in heaven.
Driving down from the trailhead, you saw them:
the orange hulls of buckeye broken by squirrel
or groundhog on a river rock. We need all the luck
we can get, you said and stopped the car.
We overturned beds of moss and oak for our
lucky charm, the shiny meat with its dimple
of brown that just fits in your palm. But the bank
was picked clean of its sweetness. We found
no buckeyes to carry home in our pockets,
to ward off rheumatism and old age and keep
the dark nights away.
Over the years we've walked this trail, at times
the exhaustions of love weighed down our pockets.
Though once you peeled back a nest of trillium
to show me Indian pipes, pale and shy in their beauty.
And once I showed you a white mushroom hiding
in the paper roots of birch. It rose as simply as this
perfect morning, beautiful in its maleness, fitting
like you in my palm when you take away
the dark night, bringing me
all the luck I need.