How Evolution Works  (more evolution of a poem)  

    

Can you hand your feet over 

to an untrodden road, wander

and wonder, maybe meander beyond

your grandparents’ immigrant lives?

Can you allow intoxication to enter your life

in rain-sifted moonlight glazing your face

and the spacious trail ahead?

There’s a silver stream roaring unceasingly

and gleaming, pouring over granite and sandstone

as July’s sun blazes high overhead.

Your bronze skin is creased by the path,

by the strangers with dogs and worn backpacks

upon whom you gaze often, sometimes befriend;

by the triumphs and dangers, copious

blunders you’ve agreed to shoulder,

this burden of tiredness, shimmering

mornings when you breathe easy and slow,

when you’re heartened by a cup of dark coffee,

a stand of birch trees in breezes swaying,

two squirrels that levitate up a thick Douglas fir trunk.

Air so alive you could sing as you blossom

into day stumbling and flailing, soberly cavorting

along this trail, this stone river twisting. The world’s

now your tavern where nothing is wasted nor cloistered,

you’ve become a drunk thanking his ancestors,

making friends with old failures, aging towards

tenderness towards stillness, a sunburnt monk

of evolving surprises, Bacchus dancing in moonshine,

savoring every slip-up, every step, every well tasted sip.