Lady’s slippers cover the bank
along this descending path;
they rise from low, puckered tongues.
Pink balloons with white veins stretching
from edges where petals fold and touch
in the valley of each inflated belly.
Wings of lime-green wood ferns
flutter from their perches, each frond a fan
of pointed spears among moss and lichen-faced rocks.
Curled silvery sheets of birch bark
strewn along the path
leave pink fleshy patches on the trunks.
I unfurl a scroll and study
horizontal rows of dark tiny dashes,
dahs in an SOS message,
tiny stitches in a quilt.
Dits arise from hemlock needles striking leaves below.
Waves lave the lakeshore
like a lover’s whisper in my ear.
I hear a loon call, then see her fly
across my path and over Cutler Lodge.
Later, a kitten cries by my window.
I want to urge her closer.
Sweet scent rises from twinberry blossoms
woven in the moss and lichen.
Wide gray spoon leaves of pussytoes
cluster in patches beneath birches and oaks.
Lichens are splattered on rocks and branches,
as if rained onto the forest floor.
My feet sink in this cushioned path where
rock edges are hidden by hairy moss sporophytes.
Rasping gnaws of beetles in fawn-colored
stumps, are drowned by vibrations of tabla and sitar
that resound from the hall,
sink into wood, escape through windows
reaching the place where we remember our lives
as loons, lichens, stones.

–Stevie O. Daniels