Air Like Fog ...

I'll always remember those bluffs, those canyons they embraced, the cool air on the trails, the kind of quiet that is only found in the woods.

Giant City State Park, located in the hills of Southern Illinois, seemed an almost magical place to go when I was a child. What a treat it was to trudge those trails, imagining all the others who had walked there before, when it was all wilderness.

As a child I relished family outings there, especially those which extended into the evening, when we'd sit around, watching the crackling flames dancing in a fireplace in one of the shelters, listening to the adults trading stories, hoping to catch some of the night sounds of the woods, too.

Later, I took my own young family there to camp, to go tramping down the same trails I had explored, to let them feast on the same sights and sounds I had enjoyed.

In more recent years, when there were just the two of us on trips back to the place where I grew up, we always managed at least a drive through the park. Those drives rekindled so many memories ... so many ...

This poem, which embodies some of those memories, is part of my first collection, Chance of Rain, published by Finishing Line Press:

Air Like Fog

Morning air clings to me like fog

as I enter the deep, cool canyons

that thread the water-rounded bluffs,

where I pause for a moment to look

about, to drink an ancient silence

that flows and deepens while lichens

struggle up the pocked, towering walls,

up, up toward a swallow's nest, high

where clinging ferns await the random

blessings of summer shade and transient

yellow light; then I notice soft-edged

flecks of light dancing on the trail

where others must have stood watching,

where they may have heard, as I do now,

a crow, distant, calling them by name.

© 2005

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Today's word: crackling