Twin sisters trail

The fire red underbelly of ferns yellowed by
low water and late fall
greet us as we step out of maple and oak
into swept old rolling Appalachian mountains.

The green is leaving the canopy along with us, a trail cut
bank along the slide.
          Red blazes on pine.
The dirt roads of Pennsylvania
are a good breakfast for a day in the woods.
I swear, some day I’ll just pull off
to the side of one and rest, watch the suns and moons
of its days and nights turn into each other.
Some clouds. A rain.

Cross Forks to Windfall to Red Ridge.
There’re your directions.

Up this high, the ground is soft.
Not like most of Pennsylvania. Didn’t turn my ankle on a rock once.

The trail curves, gaining a few feet of elevation, slowly as it
wraps itself up into the Hammersley Ravine.
    No deer. No bear. Just a few chipmunks.
This morning trout were snatching my woolly bugger
as it dipped and streaked through their water.
From up here I see no water. Just endless wooded crescents and ridgelines
folding into each other
tired from the shift of the plates of years ago.

Tonight we’ll eat fajitas around a fire, but right now
it’s just you, me, our dog
standing in the middle of this old burn - 1964 -
small birch stained yellow by October, groves of ferns,
teaberry, dark streaks on rock nestled among little thorns.
We stop and stand before leaving,
eyes closed, a wind comes up out of the deep
sweeps across our mouths, chilling the sweat, the hair at the edge
of our ears.
    It’s gone.
The taste of this settles in my tonsils.

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