Blood-Touched

April 8 2018
Her cheeks tingle, the featherlight touch.
Eyelids flutter open and no one in the room.
Clara tells me her story. I tell her mine.
We share the comfort and hair-raising
chill of old houses and long-dead grandmothers,
empty creaking rocking chairs, owls
in the mist outside cracked windows beckon
to shadows on the wall, rust stain
Rorschach tests seeping through lath
and plaster- it’s only mildly sinister
given the campfire camaraderie and
miles we’ve travelled from home back east
to this spot in the aspen grove and juniper scented
air.

Woodsmoke rises and with it
the ghosts of our childhoods who still
walk the fields of ancestral lands, not
really ours, we ponder, if you consider
the arrowheads poking out along those
high-banked meandering streambeds.
Here, now, in the summer High Uintas
we remember old men in coveralls, their
rough hands on the reins of great black
draft horses, their stern silences, brown
beer bottles tossed over the hill, the
creak and sigh of barn wood, echos of
apple- picking girls in white dresses
their peonie gardens, a summer symphony
of bugs in the humid air- never imagining
their great great granddaughters would
go west with rucksacks to test their mettle
in what was left of wilderness.

We stretch out in the glow of a dying
fire, night closing in, the throb of
another long day on the trail dulls
to match the pulse of an astonishing star lit quiet.
“They were tough, those Upstate New York
Farmers”, you say. They were tough in
Ohio too, I think. “They’d think we’re
Crazy, right”? “No doubt”, I say. Soon we’ll doze,
cheeks a-tingle, blood-touched and tended to
in the endless dark.