Lament

How many friends have I neglected because I was too busy waiting for the long shadows of January or watching clouds cross some ephemeral forest pool, dark with tannins? How many friendships have withered while I stalked a slug along an oak log orange with fungi, agog at its ability to glide on an instant carpet & retract the stilts of its eyes all the way into its head? I’ve lost friends & learned how to be merciless with myself – I mean, how to edit. Living in this mountain hollow, I tell myself I could never take the same walk twice. I have planted myself here like a yellow birch sapling on top of a hemlock stump that rots away even as the birch encircles it with an apron of roots, & a hundred years later it still preserves, unseen, the hollow shape of the corpse that gave it life.