I.
We’ve reached the point—there’s nothing left

to say. Virginia: we’ve hiked the miles

in south Shenandoah. The heat, unbearable
if not for company; today, a game of circles,

catching up the months apart. This trail trying
ground for another, infinitely possible world.
Your wife, finished with school, and a son

that sleeps through the night. My father,
upright and well. His voice on the line,
despite distance, is steady. And our mutual
friend, who we’ll drive tomorrow to see,
is not limp with grief, a portrait of the home

we’ve both left and are, increasingly, hesitant
to hold in the light. These moods of ours
do not believe in each other. Fog keeps us
honest to the ridgeline; and sunshowers,
the occasional, unexpected downpour. In one,
I shout and point toward the trail that was,
a moment ago, so obvious to us both. Divine
moment, unable to abolish our contrition.

II.

You simply can’t get away from things in the summer
as you can in the fall. The only sin this season: limitation.
My father has been, for months now, moving so slowly
I spend nights imagining he gets stuck in the same room
for weeks. Your wife shudders at the sight of her body
in the mirror. It is smaller and increasingly exposed,
jagged under your thumb in the dark. At Chimney Rock,
new growth sprouts from the cracks, straddling the line

between restrained and unbridled. We have never been trying
to get away from this, only to imagine it otherwise. The out-
and-back allows it, and the time to prepare for believing,
and it not being true, that we have seen all of this before.
The trailhead, perhaps, but nothing in between. Tomorrow,

we will sit around a fire and listen again to our friend narrate
the single moment his mother died. We will smoke cigarette
after cigarette to the half point, just as we have always done.

But before, we must drive south, and I will think then of God
and loneliness, his, of course, but mostly our own. She was there,

our friend will say, and then suddenly she wasn’t. In the valley,

I can see a single, bright house breaking through the backcountry.