To valley floor
From there the way
Cannot be known
With scant resource
For alternates
My faith is firm
No other course
Now heart resolved
Courage mustered
With just one step
My fears dissolved
With scant resource
For alternates
My faith is firm
No other course
Now heart resolved
Courage mustered
With just one step
My fears dissolved
Sometimes I know
Which way they’re going to go
Even before I make them
More often they go
The way they’re going to go
Long before I see the right or the wrong
I make choices
Sometimes I realize
Sometimes I don’t
Until they’re in the rear view mirror
Shrouded beacon
Reaches into the murk
Whisper of stifled radiance
Beckons
Illuminates
A serpentine road
Beginning and end uncertain
Strike out for the unknown
Keep faith the road reaches the bridge
Hopeful glimmer beyond
The azure sky
Suspended upon its downy bed
Of purest white
Extremes of a year’s journeys
Found in a single switchback descent
Just ahead of a desert sunset
Somehow, I find
All of it
Beautiful
No need for
Destination
No need
To have a plan
Not yet
But scan
Horizons
For potential
For places I’d like
To get
I scramble up an ebony mound
To find a landscape of ebony mounds
Growing to distant mountains
All of the same ebony skin
“At least,” I think, out loud
Into the air so dry
It swallows up the words
Right off my tongue
“the falling sun seems less
Like a fire
On a cast-iron skillet.”
Events
Connections
Love, loss
Attainment, failure
Lessons, places, people
Glories and gaffes and grace
Everything that ever happened
To get me here
Where I’m standing
In this moment now
On the path
To who I’ll be
And some roads are the long haul
Running straight and narrow
Ending somewhere beyond the horizon
Roll onto one of these
And I’ve made a commitment
Right to the end of the line
Somewhere beyond
The vanishing lines
Where the land rises
Above the horizon
The straight lines curve and wind
Flaxen plain becomes jagged stone
Sunset gives way to twilight
Gives way to deepest night
There the adventure begins
I love the places
Which carry the past
Into the present
Better still, the places where
Past and present co-exist
Without need for justification