Walking Alone, November

A poem.

The hugging trees, near my cabin. Photo by the Author.

My feet moving through leaves the only sound 
for miles, the forest fundamentally changed, 
unrecognizable with every leaf gone, fallen. 
Only tree trunks, branches everywhere, layer upon layer upon 
layer—beech, cherry, yellow and white 
birch, spruce—topography newly revealed 
now too. Far off where I could not look in summer, 
a knoll, a big stand of spruce, and I can’t resist 
bushwhacking up there, finally feeling the soft-quiet of 
the brown-dead pine needle floor under foot, looking straight 
up at the big still-green swaying branches, the wind whooshing 
through now so different than when it pushes against 
leaves, everything wholly new now and somehow unchanged, even 
the stream flowing beneath the dilapidated bridge 
pilings seems changed though still somehow the same 
black slick motion breaking through the broken 
branches of the abandoned beaver dam, louder 
now with the muting effect of leaves gone, every sound 
carrying out into the distance, especially the harsh 
scratching of my feet through leaves.  

I pause, lean against the gray-cold trunk of a beech twice
as wide as me, which I could not reach my arms around
if I tried. It leans against, has grown around, a big spruce,
and both of these lean out over the gray-black surface of the lake
like two embracing, trying not to fall. And I am falling again into the arms
of another mid-November Adirondack day, the only one for miles
and miles all around, the only one here to hear anything at all.  

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