Heaving lungs thick with honeysuckle, grasshoppers fleeing my dangerous shoes

in whirring clouds, disappear, reappear in repeated alarm, 

Following the long beckoning finger in the grass, a shining signaling 

to a compass spinning within,

An unspooling unsolvable riddle, to follow without arriving, to always be arriving,

always on the verge of it, forever almost there, around the next bend 

Turning to another bend, twisting persistent expectation, 

heading to what I continually hope

Will always be the unknown shimmering in darkness, an endless reprise

of W. Eugene Smith’s “The Walk to Paradise Garden,”

That photograph which long ago drew me to the question of its light, never about 

the sweetness of his children, that ball of alien bright just ahead of 

The familiar darkness where they held hands, stepping into a promise of who knew where,

where were those children going, countless possible openings,

Light leading to dark to light to dark in a forever of fearless inquiry,

through endless worlds unwrapping like gifts,

Running away from my frantic parents on the trail in the woods,

not one of my typical rebellions, 

Simply unable to hear them for the forever path unfolding, 

the shout of a new universe ahead was deafening, 

Drowning out their human fears, a state park footpath transformed into

the boundless earth-roads of the ancient roamers,

How often have I thought of them, tracking seas of creatures across a cryptic land

where maps had no meaning, places untamed by language,

Surely even those men, brutally organized for threat and profit, would pause,

the horizon thick with strange and surely their minds unmoored,

That fourth morning of the sesshin when the wall in front of me dissolved

into the not-knowing,

The terrible joy of leaning into the edge of the empty, then pulling back,

the wall and our names for things sadly returning,

The heaven my ego was absurdly saving itself from, my struggle to resume

that beautiful confusion where my knowledge held no meaning,

Heaving lungs thick with honeysuckle, this trail countless times over

many years, still roused by the same corner just ahead, 

Knowing exactly the ruined cedar that will be leaning there,

gray bark peeled in shavings like an ogre’s pencil, 

Yet also knowing that what I think will be the cedar is science fiction, 

that I will be outlived by an infinity of possibilities,

My one past zipping shut behind my rushing feet, a dream I misremember, 

each breath and step the only now, and now, and now.