Footnotes of Mist and Stone

Started young in Chicago,
where every strange street was unmapped wilderness.

Grade school explorer reading alleys like game trails,
learning which blocks welcomed wanderers,
which corners meant turn back.

The punks were predictable:
they kept territories like wolves.

You learned to ghost between their ranges,
finding the neutral zones:
the bakery’s back door,
the fire escape route,
the empty lot that led everywhere.

Years later, different jungle.

The trail curves left, blazed and certain,
but there, between the white pine and birch,
a narrowing where deer have written different instructions.

Not a path exactly—
grass bent but not broken,
earth pressed just enough to say “possible.”

First time, you hesitate.

The marked way promises arrival.
This other promises nothing but the going.

You find their bedroom first:
oval of pressed grass still warm with morning,
fur caught on bark at shoulder height.

Then the highway appears:
what looked like random forest suddenly shows its pattern:
the easy gap between deadfalls,
the natural ford across the stream,
the ridge that runs eye-level with the wind.

You meant to get lost
but found instead you’d been lost on the human trail,
following some committee’s idea of where a forest goes.

Each venture teaches:
here, the oak wrapped in poison ivy’s embrace,
marking where not to grab.

There, a fence appears like a mirage:
goats browsing in deep woods,
someone’s secret pasture miles from any road.

The forest keeps its own addresses:
the lightning-split beech means turn toward water,
the owl pellet pile says look up, be small.

No trail guide writes these directions down.

You learn by trespass, by trust,
by the grace of getting nowhere you meant to go.

Same on northern lakes:
canoe becomes compass,
paddle reading depths the map won’t mention.

You follow the heron’s morning route,
trust the channel between lily pads,
find passages that islands keep secret.

The water knows where shore is.

You drift through unnamed bays,
learning the lake’s back pages,
its footnotes of mist and stone.