The trail to the park from the valley
    is crisscrossed with years, like a backbone
 
Maybe the time you hit all greens home from work
or maybe the loves that simply stopped, crossing up ahead
with mates in hand and exploding nets of new trail.
Maybe it’s a bridge over the gorge of sex that always roars,
bodies scampering down into the rocks and crevasses.
In front of me, I see an endless continent blocked
by a ring of mountains it would take months to cross,
a lifetime to the Atlantic and its swamps. Everyone
in the West is alone with the West. The sea to my back,
taste of salt on my tongue as I rise through
thickets of shore weed and wide meadows
toward the pass, leaving peaks for another day
that rise from beneath the clay soil, up past
backbone bumps of time and memory, counting
cross-trails with the hope that love is a tall endless mountain
where I spread my years, walking toward you.