There’s someone you can hear in the woods,
bumbling along the trail, stumbling over roots
and dislodging stones with a boot. You guess
the rookie hiker who hasn’t left the appliance
showroom for years. Probably, he was in
refrigerator sales, promising within reason
a product with an ice maker as good
as any on the market. Or maybe, it’s
the old woman with the rescue dog, the lab mix
she adopted from the shelter during Covid.
She carries a tennis ball and a plastic atlatl
for distance shots down the wooded trail.
Sometimes you are alone, and that is best,
the only sounds are a few crows on the ridge
and the heavy puffing of your lungs inhaling
the last mapped trail in your life. The trailhead
ends at the parking lot. Your midnight blue pickup
symbolic of all that stops and fails to start.
—
Al Ortolani is a winner of the 2019 Rattle Chapbook Prize and has been featured in Garrison Keillor’s Writer’s Almanac, Ted Kooser’s American Life in Poetry, and George Bilgere’s Poetry Town. In 2024 he was the recipient of the Bill Hickok Humor Award from I-70 Review. Currently, he’s a contributing poetry editor to the Chiron Review.
