The Wild

The Wild

If you walk to the end of our street
and stare across the state route
down the lane between the rows of houses
you will see a line of pine trees

and if, holding hands, you cross the busy
road and walk down and around the corner
you will find a humming pumping station
and beyond that the wild where

trees crowd quietly together
and if you jump across the small stream,
which your map will later tell you is called
Beaver Brook, then you will find

beyond the green briar, a surveyor’s stone
with the wild grown up around it
a place where once someone dreamed
roads— but where you dream wilderness:

coyotes and foxes, turkeys and raccoons
possums and skunks, rabbits and fisher cats
and owls and the chorus of spring peepers
which you can hear through the open windows

at summer’s end. We first found this spot
on a warm wintry day when the sidewalks were still
glazed in ice which you broke with your stomping
boots and puddles into which you dipped long sticks.

And we dared not cross the cold brook then
but stood and stared and wondered
where it came from and where it was
wandering so happily singing to itself

And that place stayed with you in your
warm cache of memory until another day
in early spring when we took Daddy there
and crawled across mossy logs to find

puddles and pools and plenty of sticks
and a promise that we will come again
and again and again to this small in between
pocket of no mans land where daydreams roost.