Robert Frost popped into my head the other morning while on the Limestone Link Trail, “Two roads diverged in a yellow wood, And sorry I could not travel both,” The divergence, clearly marked by post in cage, separated trail from track. And while no beech tree’s yellowed leaves hovered overhead, the golden hue of late-year elms sufficed for literary pause. I took the one less traveled by, and it made all the difference,” opening up my heart and mind to verse and verve as my feet went swiftly by.
Wendell Berry’s voice echoed up from Kentucky this time last year while I traversed The Berms at Ringtail Ridge, “When despair for the world grows in me and I wake in the night at the least sound in fear of what my life and my children’s lives may be, I go and lie down where the wood drake rests in his beauty on the water, and the great heron feeds.” Last February, The Berms enclosed two marshes full of drakes, whistling ones not wood like his, but comforting all the same. And in the really dire times, I take to our river blue with kids aboard a paddle board, to herons, night and green. We are thrice blessed in our town to have such poetry in motion.
Terry Tempest Williams and Naomi Shihab Nye often ride atop my pack as I wander through the Bend, Big Bend, that is. Yet it is the poetry of an unnamed vaquero that speaks most often to my time upon those trails, “You go south from Fort Davis, Where rainbows wait for rain, Where the river is kept in a stone box, And the water runs uphill, And the mountains tower into the sky Except when they disappear to visit other mountains at night.” Poetry is a kind of incantation, capturing what prose cannot, and freeing the soul from mortal coils. This experience is no more true than in the Chisos Mountains, who I am convinced do indeed visit one another on new moon nights.
Shakespeare’s sonnets once kept me from all poems, but a trip to Alpine years ago showed me something yet unseen. The Cowboy Poetry Festival, now the Lone Star Poetry Gathering, revealed no PhD was needed, just the love of word and trail and the courage to say more with less. If you want to hear it for yourself, there’s now a Lone Star Poetry Gathering in Bastrop, and it meets this month, Feb 18-21.
