The Trails in New Jersey

This one bent its woods above a highway,
the muffled hum of traffic

mingling with music of towhees,
tanagers, chips and trills of warblers,

our state suddenly lush: Interstate
80 to Exit 1, Jurassic bluffs

over the drowsy Delaware.
The muscles in my mother’s legs

pulsed as she pushed on—I was sixteen,
about to forget how to love her.

~

The road from that place cuts through
ten more states, all the way to California.

My mother drove it once with me,
but not completely and never again, and here

I am returning in my insufficient way
to moss-slick rocks where we paused

for lunch, to the crisscross of hemlocks
where I crouched at dusk,

the sun signing off, the one
scrap of cloud arched like an eyebrow.

~

I hike alone now, scramble banks
in short boots, my ankles strong.

I know the names of creeks and ridges,
what they are, what they used to be.

My mother flies now when she visits.
We sit in restaurants, avoid more

than we talk about. She asks about
the mountains I’ve come to call my mothers.

She sees the farms, asks about the earth,
parched and yellow.

I am her Wild West; I am her gone, gone.