If I keep the slope to my left,
the stone wall to my right and
stalk, silent in the nearly spring snow fall,
I can sneak around the rock ledge to startle
the gang of white tails gathered for
brief respite behind the cliff,
watch them bounding, floating through the woods
in that graceful, paniced dash deer do.

We have not walked this way for two winters now,
my Golden Retriever and I.
He has aged to old to fight the drifts.
I have missed his companionable skelter as we go.
But, truth be told, it aches my arches,
that long trudge through knee deep snow.
So, we have not seen all the new downed scag
scared across the ground or how that
great grand pine, whose boughs gave shelter
to a geneology of dove and fawn,
has rotted, cracked and crashed.

Today, with the bleary sun squinting through the gray
and a second blizzard of snow melt
dropping from the pine limbs,
plopping a deluge of soggy cotton,
I made the hike alone,
Buddy asleep on his warm hearth rug,
and saw the mighty differences in the
dying, growing glade.

It is winters tattered edge now,
equinox emerging nightly,
crocus shoots elbowing through
slush and mottled leaves.
Rebirth and birdsongs soft riot
blend in a cotton ball wood.

But not, I think, for Buddy,
neither for that old pine.
Nor for,
nor for,
me?