random gifts?

expectations

the creek is charged
and the water charges down it,
some beech nearby still hold some of their leaves
as if to keep company awhile
with rhododendron & hemlock & holly,
which, though slowed by the cold, will make it through the winter
to capture and hold the sun in themselves,
thousands of poplar seeds are like sharp white petals
scattered among the chocolate brown
of sycamore, oak, and poplar leaves
spread over the dark and mossy earth,

fall’s exuberance of color is gone
and the extravagance
with which
Christmas answers the Solstice
is not here,
I had hoped, as I usually do, for bears to still be about,
despite the year’s last supper being over
and despite the cold which freezes what water it can in the night,

today I hike hard up Road Prong
to a waterfall by the trail which centers me,
I expect the aerobics of that exercise, and I get it,
and I expect the beauty of the water falling and receiving,

I also find gifts I did not anticipate:
tracks of raccoon and coyote in the snow on the log footbridge











and frozen in the sand above the falls,







and, when I stop to notice, evanescent art
as leaves are edged with white frost
and adjacent moss holds a frosting of snow,











yesterday, I hoped for elk and found them,
though more fully expressed in their essence
than I could have hoped-for,
yesterday, I also planned a hard hike in the same valley
to admire again old growth trees I hadn’t visited for decades,
my will then thwarted by a log footbridge
tilted and glazed with a slippery sheen of ice,
another footbridge, I find out later, washed-out
a mile up the fork of the stream,

a few hours later, I hike hard on the other side of the Smokies
to another grove of old growth wood,
and the great poplar I’ve loved to visit within it seems dead,
all its bark off in the side below me on the trail,
and there, where I hike today,
the universe gifts me with a plague of dead hemlocks,

life narrows possibilities, denies some,
and still randomly offers gifts of kindness
for which we can thank our lucky stars
if we have the openness and wit
to notice the gifts before us.

by Henry Walker
December 2, ’11