EIGHTMILE LAKE HIKE TRAIL

First break, crossing stream.

Hot. Don’t need this shirt.

Bashō says the poem

is only a poem

as it’s being written,

and then it’s gone.

No hurry to this lake.

Here I am beside this movement.

Red thread in water.

Follow it all the way home—

if it’s a shoelace,—

show itself in suchness.

This is the way, walker.

Four decades past

hiking into Goat Rocks

from back side, a lone hiker, 70,

walking stick his solitary companion,

stops me on the trail. One day,

I say to myself, and he carries me.

Heel to toe rest step,

here I am, his age.

Take a drink of water,

follow that string until

you don’t know its name,

a growing root, its own life,

disappearing under water.

Lightly through my fingers,

red threads in stream bed

touching the scouring storyline.

In the act of releasing

the other, I take bandanna

from my neck, immersing it

rippling in moving water.

Placing it over my head,

four corners of wetness

dripping and cooling,

I am given permission

to enter. What is clean

will remain, a reminder,

gift of red thread in moving water.

Jim Bodeen
25-28 June 2015