The collected ice slips off the edges of the trail, squashed by the weight of spring sunlight. The bear tracks go with it, lost evidence, and before me the ground shows up intermittent, where the shade falls short this mid-afternoon, too slight to sustain any winter.

I've resigned I am not out to play or to answer some flicker of angst. All those drives and desires dropped off long ago, as ice into water, a dream that melts into river, downstream and washed clean from my mind.

Why, an arrow could cut past my ear and stab halfway through the red bark beside me; it could pluck a stark navy jay from the air. Would I duck? It is silly to imagine such absent adventures, with the highway buzzing nine miles away and the comet streak of an airplane dissipating in the cobalt sky.

The satiny mountains curve steep and heave from their imposing heights white gobs of snow in such slow motion it oozes like magma into the cup of a valley below. This disintegration of the earth, followed by its own rebirth, all sparkly dark gray granite on top, chopped up into canyons, channeled through depths to pour into washes that gush out green life; all this has contributed to the pellet of stone that has threaded its way into my shoe. And this dreadful walking everywhere I go! unbound by maps; with a failing floppy hat? Sad. I like to think I am alone--though to wander at leisure by a long-settled boulder or under the branches of an unkempt pine popping with finches, over ground crisscrossed with the patterns of otherwise invisible predators, I can only place solitude as an imagined illusion undone by the land.