It’s been suggested to me that I’d do better
to have a lie-in instead of waking so early
full of foolish hope, making the dog paw
at the curtains frantic as ever for her first
elusive kill. That nobody cares that I’m awake
to see the smudge of last night’s peach in the sky
or the fox tracks black on the wet lawn,
that sensible people are heaving their arms
and legs from left to right, smoothing the pillow
for one more dream, and I am blessed to be
a woman with cotton pillows who never need
rise at dawn, nor shrug a pack onto her back,
a woman with no reason to climb
to mountain cairns above the sling of a coll
nor to place on their conical heads a stone
like a million other oval rain-worn weights,
scarlet and silver splashed amid grey,
stones I think I can bear in my pocket. Others
don’t trudge up nameless paths whose wooden signs
rotted to splinters years ago, trodden by
so many long-dead pilgrims that not one
toughened blade of grass survives to cut
my skin, nor push their faces, whipped by wind
and streaked with exhaustion, into air that thins
with every step. I’d do better to let the pillow
hold my head, reach over and find your soft
and lonely hand that holds no pen and join you
in the unspoken. I say so little anyway.
I only take small stones from here to there,
leaving them where nobody will walk until
spring melts the white hem of another
winter snow, swallowing ice inch by inch until
there’s nothing to see but granite under sky.
