"This isn't a city, but a forest.
And a child on an adventure who
happens by a stone farmhouse..."

– Ralph Angell, from "Long Shadows, Many Footsteps"










Perrot Trail, Where We Met a Dog, a Farm and River




Not only my footsteps but a dog named Riggs.
Owner a backwoodsman left him off the leash.
The trail was of a silver ice and I disappeared

somewhere in the beginning; mossy bridge
that took us over a run off creek to canopy.
The world was waking underneath me.

Why hadn't you come? We stopped at the top
of Perrot skyline trail where three metal prongs
stood without a bench just waiting for spring.

It's there you would have come to know me.
We sat down on one; a wash of cornfields east.
West, a galactic blue flow of the Mississippi.

The natives would have taken a time-out too
among a rush of tasks and weavings and fire.
Some moments would fly into mind like eagle.

Likely a breath and a vision of oneself rising
up out the river of the heart seeping into stone.
Here they still stood watching and waiting.