Terry Adams

Lost (2)

I like to spend just a few hours
once in awhile
not knowing where I am,
off the path
in the forest I walk every week,
slipping through a wall of Huckleberry,
into this profound density
of stunted understorey:
dead fall, invasive Willow, Tan Oak,
Poison Oak, over a mycological
treasury, and I become aware
I am a sex,
momentarily relieved of subject
or object, not recognized exactly,
but feeling flirted at,
seduced, by color and shape,
entertaining a slow, draped,
or webbed peep-show
of Wild Rose, Honeysuckle,
reclining Irish Moss, Dwarf Maple,
tripping through a proletariat of Bracken,
in my inner chamber music
of creaking knees, borne along —
in a sympathetic sigh of bones,
through thriving veils of languid decay —
leave it here, it grows, I say,
where on-board loss to aching hips
and shrinking muscles
is re-vivified beside this fallen Fir,
lounging and sloughing
a bent sideshow of side-slipping shingles,
dreaming down toward soil,
where my up-step soft-shatters
the black confection into a year’s worth
of worm and weevil work.
It spills under a skirt
of Dimpled Speckelwort,
as if welcoming a thing like me,
who’s slow apocalypse is nothing
in the face of one night’s wind.
I must wind around
impenetrable thickets losing
the way, from a way already
lost, trying to see how this twisty
lurching-way will look
when returning.
I believe I am staying within screaming
distance of the main path,
from which a person might smell
a corpse once
every few life-times or –
but the swivel of my ankle,
the kink of neck, carries me
on a strange azimuth of body –
my mild ambition
and the focus required
for a non-teetery weight-shift carries me
where vegetable archways appear.
What do I know that will ever
be so different? I will
be lost if I let myself believe so
for a minute.
The Cardinal Directions
dissolving in my rotating skull
about as useful as a passage from
Finnegan’s Wake,
as I dally over
Maidenhair, Spleenwort,
while a fallen Redwood in its frugality
of imitation death busily arabesques
its squirrel-scarred limbs
into children reaching
skyward.

Terry Adams  lives on the bank of San Gregorio creek, in a Redwood forest in La Honda,
California, where he rescued the former home of Ken Kesey. His collection, Adam’s Ribs, is
available from Off The Grid Press. He’s had poems in Catamaran, California Fragile, and
Midnight Chem. His website is terryadamspoetry.net