More newts swam than I could count where I went out mendicant, unguided, lacking motive, to watch them turn and roll among the weed, upturned bellies full of gold, little hands anointing stalk and stone, concerned with up, and air, and down, and muck, traveling the frond-road through a world of many ladders, where good things always sink. I was a debtor walking uphill, rehearsing an explanation and removing, now and then, a banana slug from the way—always in the direction of its journey—for I have never been impeded, or I have deserved impediment, unlike a slug which must retract its eyes when awe strikes and which has not seen, as I have, its brethren crushed beneath a boot. The angel met me coming down. I found him standing by the trail, one hand outstretched and pointing at what I had not seen behind me. He wore REI and lichen. He glistened like a newt. “Trillium,” he said. I saw then that he had been here seven years, carried by an ant to deputize this rotting cedar, waiting in the loam, rough-skinned, for me.
This poem was selected for a local anthology called Still the Water: Olympia Poets on Place. Notes to follow.
As always, so impressed with your cadence, and the rise and fall of scale and (at least to me) intensity. Thanks for this one