Scarlet Tanager
in the honeyed slant before sunset
in the last hemlock grove,
I stepped off trail and was lost—
what soft human desire pressed me
into these woods,
what hunger
gnawed at the trees until
only gnarled needleless hands
held the sky
—no Virgil, no small gods, no guide,
only a scarlet tanager
against the sun’s slow fold
to follow, threading the pines elliptically,
the black wings of the tanager,
the ghost grove, and I
stumble toward dusk or north
forward with all sureness
behind me, now black
against red—I count on the loop of the trail
as a small grace
whose sunken earth emerges
as a question I must answer
whose interior forest birds
call che-ree, che-ree, see me
mouthfuls of moths, the tanager returns
home to the hollows always turning
before milk spills across the sky
