The Tether

Again and again the path

turns aside, fretting its way downslope—

foot-slicked, unscrolling.

On all sides, the blurred, shifting forest,

expansive architecture of its canopy

grown up from the untended,

the wounded ground.

Multiflora rose snags out into the path.

How does one love with one’s whole heart?

How to wrench open the last chamber

of that fisted, clenching creature—the heart

snared in the corporeal, in sinew and bone.

Always something held in check.

Something that watches:

the fox, hanging back in the brambles;

the deer, motionless, then erupting

away into the rank growth of the floodplain.

The layered cathedral ceiling shudders

over the beaten path.

Everyone I care for lies sleeping,

and I’m out here pounding

my feet against the hill,

as if the day itself

will part before me and grant entry

into its deepest being.

Each dawn I lace my shoes

in a small gesture of departure.

Head down, breathing hard,

waiting for downhill’s

loose-limbed release,

the burrowing descent into sycamore and maple.

The path is my light tether, a cord

that swings me back to my starting place.

Mid-February, and the slim buds of the beeches

are still firm.

Not yet the great stirring, not yet

the unstoppable unfurling, the softening,

the unshackling.

Just the tightly rolled rhododendron leaves,

the waxy, spiked hollies.

I run into my solitude, stiff and slow,

leave no tracks on frozen ground.

Maybe I am my own shadow,

tagging along just behind the present moment.

Reluctant guest, whatever I have been offered,

I have taken only a portion.

Whatever I have given, I have held back more.

Not so the Japanese wisteria, brazen invader,

pushing its way into sunlight.

Its dry vines leap to the treetops,

weave an opportunistic smothering crown

for this ragtag woodland,

this derelict ground.

Even before the vines’ leaves expand, their clustered flower buds

will swell and open

and scent will spill out,

the path below will be littered with petals.

A last upslope through the forest’s edge

choked in honeysuckle,

then the jolting step onto sun-warmed asphalt.

Houses line the pavement,

each in its own patch of lawn.

Mine is the third from the end,

the one with grass rubbed away beneath the swing.

Here’s my cracked, concrete walk,

my stunted dogwood,

my wrought-iron railing— and here’s my life,

the one I chose,

the only one I’ll know.

It slides along behind the door,

in the voices of my children, awake and quarreling,

in the sound of dishes clinking against a glass tabletop.

Here’s my hand on the worn knob,

and here I am, pushing open the door—

here I am, entering.