So here we are again, at the corner of twilight 
     and self-mystification
Lost again!
The road leads ever on, as I have read somewhere,
     or perhaps everywhere,
and so we are always ‘someplace,’
but truly there is more elsewhere than I am ever prepared to accept
     or, as the man said,
dream in my philosophy
and, right now, in this moment of befuddlement 
I am unable to be philosophical about all these ‘back,’
     or upper, or, as other poets have called them, ‘far fields’
lurking in this ‘neck’ of the woods,
though in present circumstances I believe it more accurate 
to say we have lost our way 
in nature’s whole ‘upper digestive track.’
 
The hills we gaze upon from here are in all relevant respects 
much the same as the hills we saw when we knew 
where we were 
      (or thought we did)     
and thus also believed we knew 
     where we were going
So now, of course, we bewail the absence of signage,
as if some protective, supervisory entity has let down its guard,
     some divinity of open space, or god of preservation,
guidebook author to foolish mortals.
 
Two roads diverged – spun off? disappeared? –  in a wood – 
     or, more accurately,
one of those gone-back, re-wilded, cut twice a year, beautifully 
     tangled wild-thing meadows
to which we meaningfully drive, intending to be here now,
      this time of year  
in order to experience the magnificent fullness 
of these extra-human playgrounds of plants and fungi –
and have faced not only similar choices of diverting pathways,
but this very division, a dozen times in the past,
 
this time choosing the other and that has made,
      if not all,
then a less than truly edifying difference
as we stare at rooftops we had not known existed, 
and take equally unknown paths that lead not into temptations,
but neither to familiar destinations –
culminating, as light begins to fade, in some significant agita 
     in the body politic.
Just ‘two paths in the woods’: that’s how it started,
but someone has torn up the mental maps
and scattered the twisted remains beneath the table.
 
So: downhill, any whichway (witch-way?) now,
discovering hermit huts that do not appear in our previous 
     reckoning of our universe,
places without names, 
esplanades of trees wholly unmarred by human use
until, at last, the fallen world descends to a ruggedly paved road 
     suggesting, unmistakably, the haunts of humans,
perhaps sensible ones, though none we know.
Yet, following this clue offered by the fullness of time and Earth,
the declining day comes down to an honestly car-riven road 
     of a night-purple hue
and so we face the final existential quandary: right or left?
 
How will the body politic decide?
The sensible party flags down a shiny vehicle,
its elderly and (happily for us) local occupants point the way,
and so, not altogether hopelessly lost in the end,
we are but merely, temporarily, misplaced.
 
And in response to the query our inner taskmaster,
and disappointed life coach, inevitably poses 
by means of that age-old harpy voice:
‘What have you learned from this disturbance?’ 
we may boldly reply,
‘At least we were together.’
                        

My new prophet, my goddess,
wordless message-bearer and law-giver,
speaks to me in the ‘language of appearances,’ 
the outer wear of mortality 
that sweetly homeward glides, as do, 
the master said,*
the angels of exfoliation: How beautifully
      they die.
 
The limbs of our days stretch outward, skyward.
We walk in the heavens of the old gods, and the new.
We bow only to forever,
that great-winged bird of passage, time’s voyage,
ever-plunging to the center of life
the whole of the knowing,
the blessing of culmination.
 
* ‘The leaves teach us how to die’ – Henry David Thoreau
                        

Just now brushing the summit line of the hills 
    to the west, the far side of the pond,
the golden light mellowed
Everything at once is burning
Two crows fly in parallel, crowing in unison,
     a winged sibling rivalry
Twilight begins this way, the sun putting out
     its own fire
The pool of the sky draining its wash of perfect blue
     as if to save something up for tomorrow
Breeze pausing, nothing more parachuting down to join
    the pile of brown and desiccated volunteers,
those heroically ‘fallen’ leaves 
We no longer care where they pool together on the deck
Winds of the weeks to come will drive them 
     to their corner pile-ups, 
debris from some epic race-car mash-up
Pinkish tones of still-blooming annuals grow stronger
as all other colors fade
I fade 
The traffic noise lingers from distant roadways
now the air has lost all motion
the light flattens
road music loses the tonic
only the crows protest