A step past the marker
and I lose the path,
sink in a mud slough,
fern beds, skunk cabbage,
the marish and mire
I’m not meant to walk through.
My eye does not betray
me as it wanders,
tracking the flicker
scaling a smooth trunk,
scooping the blood-red
fungus from a stump.
I’m a master of many
astonishments who
knows how to follow
the wonder and the way
at once, who is not
easily led astray.
And I seek on my walk
a respite from sturm
and speed, slow progress,
a spider in the leaves,
a rangy aster
almost gone to seed.
Yet I hear your voice
in this quiet wood,
insistent sentences
of pure sound raining
down through bare branches,
syllables without sense
closing the distance
between us like relic
radiation, or
the sibilance of sin,
the siren’s song after
the siren has gone.
Unmanned, I follow
what I hear in my ear,
and I lose the path
for a thick blackness
of muck, my compass
spinning on its axis.
John Tessitore has been a journalist and biographer. He has taught American history and literature, and directed several national policy studies. His poems appear in the American Journal of Poetry, Canary, The Wallace Stevens Journal, Wild Roof, Magpie Lit, the Sunday Mornings at the River anthology and forthcoming in The Closed Eye Open and Boats Against the Current.