I look for trails a person leaves.
Places where the branches are bent.
A curl of flattened grass
where they stopped to rest or sleep.
Or look at the sky,
like looking inside their life,
where no one memory obscures the view.
Not a twig, but branches.
Clouds with their many loves.
Clusters of snow on invisible mountains.
Then tracks that stop again,
as if they heard shouting,
or were listening to the throb of the wind,
or being still,
or waiting for something.
Or then, if there was a sea nearby,
what direction did they take?
Did they walk directly to the edge
of the shore?
Are there steps to each side,
or did they disappear,
levitate over the crest of the waves
and become a gull.
Or fall into the fathoms beneath,
and become a shadow in the swaying weed?
Did life resume somewhere after swimming,
and they travel back to the grass,
the woods,
a trail through the brush?
I long to see other paths join theirs.
I want to know the person had friends,
companions,
that their life was going somewhere else,
and they not become the skeletons of fish,
or clams,
bleached and still,
the journey over.
Did the person love again,
go back to a house,
write a song,
find a war they could fight?