NARROW PASSAGE CREEK

Heidi Woolever

I woke up one morning
above Narrow Passage Creek,
far from long smoking lines of city paths,
a season of aching pressed into places,
and followed tracks of wild turkeys.

These old mountains,
ridges of smoke shadows, ghosts lamenting,
damp winter smolderings, cycled through me.
Motions of fur and bones, and dusk rising blue.

The Appalachain mountains,
all hollers and coves, level that straight shot.
Skull to hard skull lending eyes and ears
and teeth no way to move.
Here it is not a matter of fact,
that light lost, and what the sight conjured.

These old mountains,
not like Alaska's blue midnight sky and
tundra carpet stretching beyond it's very ends.
Alaska can swallow you whole.

These old mountains carry me.
Pine tar plugs up holes.
And around the bend a stillness.