It’s hard to see them through the lacing of forest shadows,
the old crimson blazes on tree-trunks marking the line.
Sometimes the tree has fallen. Sometimes the paint
has worn away and could be confused for lichen.
I clamber down banks, trample underbrush, pause
squinting between boughs, seeking the next mark.
The pines have scaly, lacerated bark.
Yellow birches wring crabbed hands and shudder.
I played here as a child, now I stumble
from boulder to moss hollow. Who was that girl
in raggedy summer jeans and smudged T-shirt
scrambling up granite ledges? I think I see her
slip like a coyote into older dark.
She had unevenly cropped hair, grime in her fingernails.
She crouched on a rock, mid-stream, and peered for trout,
umber quaver in the bronze-flecked flow.
And once, in shadow, kissed another girl
on the mouth, both of them wanting to know
how a boy’s kiss would taste. It tasted of fear:
moist, tremulous, hovering on a brink
of territory imagined but unmarked
whose wind came muttering through branches, smelling
of balsam and leaf-mold, of creatures loosened back into the ground.
