chief mountain

to be lost in the woods is to remember what hearing sounds like; is to forget fallen trees scraping the skin on your legs and for your feet to become paws hands grasping the ground more light and quick; is to have your toes think.
scree slopes, boulders and caves, fossils in the heat, we climbed fingers and feet and sweat through rock piles we could recognize from shed fallen away skin of mountain. the height the view i am not a bird and i quake and i faced a real possibility of gravity while the wind teased our balance.
we slide down the mountain; graceless skiing the scree. the rock turns to moss, to juniper bushes, to stream beds, the trees grow taller, the sun sets behind the next hill, and we drink from a spring, filling our waterbottles from the mountainside. we walk closer together.
cool nights looming trees; a path we cannot find, a bear we cannot see, in the the forest night, the moon is obscured, the pebbled underbrush of the ground has to imagine becoming a bed.
to be lost in the woods is to watch the sunrise, our creaking bodies pushing forwards our feet our feet our feet our feet to be bathed to be found to find our way out to know the mountain.