[Rigel]

We were driving back home and I saw a footpath leading off into the trees. I wasn't the one driving, so my mind was free to wander. When I got to the house and realized I hadn't written anything in a few days, I decided to open up a Word document. This sort of spilled out as I thought about that footpath.

(preemptive source info: Also posted on my poetry blog.)

And If I Could Find It

Line upon endless line of trees
Stalwart soldiers of verdure
Licking asphalt hopelessly in idleness
They line my path and I use them to mark my progression

A village path, populated by pregnant sounds of nature
The buzz of existences separate from my own
I feel them in every bit of my world

Gravel crunching beneath my feet
Nature-made, man-trodden

I breathe the worth of the world
I breathe the atoms in the arguments
I love endlessly this path that leads on into the winding green

The sun lowers its eyes over the mountain
All is darker than dark and unseen in a moment
My feet know the way
This path I’ve never walked is like home to my body
And I take it fearlessly, unfazed by the solitude

Onward, moon and celestial sisters overhead
A single insect lets out a melancholic wail
It misses the daylight, though its hunts are at night

I want to laugh
I am separate from the nature that I am bound to

The rough edge of a rock grazes my leg
A wound, a reminder of the cold and the harshness
I cannot sit down and I cannot rest

I must go on

Wrapped in stars, my eyes perceive a stretching tree
Its gnarled arms reach upward toward the heavens
Its dead roots reach downward toward white and silence
I thought desirous foolishness was man’s alone

I round a bend in the path; my grip on the earth releases and I fall
A painful slide toward the bottom of a dirt mound
I stand and shake off the hurt

The residual bog from a raging thunderstorm sits in wait
It throws a confused frog my way
How did you get so far from home?

And where is home?

I overtake the water
I do not shield my feet
I do not waste an experience

The dirt path turns slowly to stony plates as I progress
There is definite evidence of human traversal
I am not yet alone on my road
There are phantom feet beside me, guiding me on

I see a break in the path and pause
My feet remember the sensation of endless movement
They wait impatiently for me to move again

On through the trees, the sounds of life from the city long since inaudible

I press my hand against the side of a stone
Its base embedded in the ground
I feel suddenly as though I am caressing the whole world
One simplified motion

I pull away and move on
There is not time for distraction
I must reach the end of this path

My heartbeat races as the dawn begins to suggest itself on the horizon
I feel as though, if the sun rises, I will have lost this battle
I must find it

My feet begin to beat out a quicker tempo
I am running
I do not remember beginning to run

If I can only reach it
If I can only see the end of this path

My feet stutter to a halt and my mouth opens in silent shock
The sun casts its radiance down before me
Breaking through spires on the mountains to reach this spot

I smile

Before me, there is only a stone
The path ends here
I walk forward very slowly, reverently
The stone has words on its ravaged face

┌ I took the path most traveled by, and it led me nowhere.
But I believe I found my heart along this road. ┘