Poetry by Anne Rankin
Nature is an expression of intelligence and necessity.
PLATO
Here where mountain marries earth to the sea, I open like a prayer.
The climb begins with a sigh as I scour the trail for the wag of his tail.
Clouds form stepping stones into the horizon, and I wonder how
to find a way to tomorrow. Or if I even want to hear the silence that follows.
The spirit of the dog walks beside me;
his step keeps pace with my grief.
One year since. A cool morning then, just like today. A whisper
of early autumn air being polite, nothing more. One of those days you’re blind
to the darkness that’s coming. Gulls and ravens trade places
in the sky, but I’m resigned to the gray that lives between.
I’m in the kind of place where you can’t get there from here.
The way you sometimes need rain to move air.
A bird out of sight offers up its lone song, but all I can hear
is, Still gone, still gone. Far below, ocean keeps sending itself onto shore,
tending the earth’s wounds with waves. Above, the sun rises
over the trees, turning up the volume of the sky.
As the trail stretches skyward, I’m searching what’s near, seeking
what’s revealed in the rooms of the climb.
Autumn huckleberry bleeds into the surrounding hills,
but I’m tuned to the pitch of the path, the blazing red leaves
saying more than I can bear. My eye catches a common tern
sweeping the sea, and I hand myself from rock to rock,
finding solace in the scratch of shoe against granite. I struggle
to unlace the root-studded trail, only to find myself entwined instead.
On this mountain that hands land to sea, the breeze reminds me
of something worth knowing, and I breathe deep,
lungs grateful for all that salt air can relieve.
Ahead, a stand of scrub pine raises questions I can’t answer.
As views of Sand Beach keep turning my head, I’m wondering
what word the sea might offer for grace.
But further along the trail I spot a cairn
stacked in place by some fellow wanderer
who needed to assure me with something only stones can say:
You will find your way, even as the earth turns below your feet.
The spirit of the dog walks beside me;
his step keeps pace with my grief.
Anne Rankin‘s poems have appeared in The Healing Muse, The Poeming Pigeon, Hole in the Head Review, Passager, Scapegoat Review, Atlanta Review, Rattle (forthcoming), and elsewhere. Her poem “Small Primer on Loneliness” received Honorable Mention at the Belfast Poetry Festival 2021.
