Ed Brickell

A Snow Hike

An afternoon of bright needles on our faces. The frozen lake, the tree-dark shoreline. Our hiking poles tapped the ice on the trail, boots crunching. A stop in a clearing, a repeated hum against my body like the cry of a tiny animal, a message arriving in snow and silence. I returned the words from nearly two thousand miles away to my pocket. We were quiet for a while, shouldered our poles and held gloved hands tight on the wide trail. Pitch pine and cedar, holly and oak. 

hiking in the snow
the news of his cancer
cold in my pocket

Without Mountains

I have returned without mountains to my small accustomed place,
bounded by a tottering fence of anonymous color,
an old bird bath dark with rusted leaves and clouds of moss,
an exact space defined in all dimensions, detailed in city records,
filled with carefully pruned trees and acorns buried by squirrels,
this bought and paid for lot, entirely without mountains.
I can fill these spaces with one finger to my eye,
I can ask a friendly god a favor. A long way 
from blind giants making their own weather, 
throwing clouds of snow over granite shoulders 
as if warding off some cosmic curse. 
Some things are too big to be seen,
blurs of many seasons endured
in an alien morning. Photographs are futile,
perspectives flatten and fail,
the vast forest we spent half a day traversing
shrunk into an afterthought of sticks.
I could never bear Good and Evil on such a scale,
someone once said of a famous book of myth
the same when I was heavy with mountains, 
beauty bearing down with crushing weight,
now sorting through the epic mysteries
to the blurred picture I took of you near the trail,
snowflakes across the secretless curve of your mouth
like fireflies, a smile I was glad to recognize
among the spectacular indifference,
a smile without mountains.

Back to Issue XII…