Wood Song

Becky Adams
Wood Song

Past the ducks, past that bullshit fence
past the waterline and the treeline
and the alpine zone, we can be coffee-drinkers.
Tree-huggers. Forest-pissers. Alone.

I want to mark every trail like a dog
out to the rock and back, up to the rim and back,
each step a dune-slide from the ultimate goal.
You want river fords and scraped stone
and and to see a wild bat, high as wind,
dusty as coal.

Felted blanket between our shivering feet,
we scan the clouds and the fog
and the weird shadows and then
the clouds' weird shadows until we see
our first bird circling below us, making
switch-backs in the sky. Flying raisin.

That we two are together, arguing, singing,
shitting in the woods and lying about it,
breaking and fixing equipment daily,
makes us worthy now, expeditioneers.
The camp stove speaks to me like Lumiere.

If caribou, I think I might have peed, but
you can't have it all and now we're near home
with stands of sugar maple, sunroof down
and the two of us freezing. Risk-takers.
Pot-scratchers. Bug-freakers. Seers.