The Garden of Verse: Let's Take a Different Path Through the Woods This Time, What Can Possibly Happen? "Lost Again" in December's Verse-Virtual

Here's my poem on what happens when we decide to take a little walk in a very big place, the "great" outdoors. It's one of three poems in December's Verse-Virtual that treat the pleasures and -- uh, challenges of autumn in New England... I know, the season's barely over, but I can't wait to do it again.  

 Lost Again

So here we are again, at the corner of twilight 
     and self-mystification
Lost again!
The road leads ever on, as I have read somewhere,
     or perhaps everywhere,
and so we are always ‘someplace,’
but truly there is more elsewhere than I am ever

     prepared to accept or, as the man said,
dream in my philosophy
and, right now, in this moment of befuddlement 
I am unable to be philosophical about all these

     ‘back,’ or upper, 

or, as other poets have called them, ‘far fields’

lurking in this ‘neck’ of the woods,
though in present circumstances I believe it more

     accurate to say we have lost our way 
in nature’s whole ‘upper digestive track.’
 
The hills we gaze upon from here are in all relevant 

     respects 
much the same as the hills we saw when we knew 
where we were 
      (or thought we did)     
and thus also believed we knew 
     where we were going
So now, of course, we bewail the absence of signage,
as if some protective, supervisory entity 

has let down its guard,
     some divinity of open space, or god of 

preservation,
guidebook author to foolish mortals.
 
Two roads diverged – spun off? disappeared? –  

in a wood – 
     or, more accurately,
one of those gone-back, re-wilded, cut twice a year, 

     beautifully tangled wild-thing meadows
to which we meaningfully drive, intending 

to be here now,
      this time of year  
in order to experience the magnificent fullness 
of these extra-human playgrounds of plants 

      and fungi –
and have faced not only similar choices 

     of diverting pathways,
but this very division, a dozen times in the past,
 
this time choosing the other and that has made,
      if not all,
then a less than truly edifying difference
as we stare at rooftops we had not known existed, 
and take equally unknown paths that lead not 

     into temptations,
but neither to familiar destinations –
culminating, as light begins to fade, in some 

     significant agita in the body politic.

Just ‘two paths in the woods’: that’s how 

     it started,

but someone has torn up the mental maps
and scattered the twisted remains beneath the table.
 
So: downhill, any whichway (witch-way?) now,
discovering hermit huts that do not appear 

     in our previous reckoning of our universe,
places without names, 
esplanades of trees wholly unmarred by human use
until, at last, the fallen world descends to a ruggedly

     paved road 
suggesting, unmistakably, the haunts of humans,
perhaps sensible ones, though none we know.
Yet, following this clue offered by the fullness of time

     and Earth,
the declining day comes down to an honestly 

     car-riven road of a night-purple hue

and so we face the final existential quandary:

     right or left?
 
How will the body politic decide?
The sensible party flags down a shiny vehicle,
its elderly and (happily for us) local occupants 

     point the way,
and so, not altogether hopelessly lost in the end,
we are but merely, temporarily, misplaced.
 
And in response to the query our inner taskmaster,
and disappointed life coach, inevitably poses 
by means of that age-old harpy voice:
‘What have you learned from this disturbance?’ 
we may boldly reply,
‘At least we were together.’

To see my other two poems in this issue and sample

the work of some fifty other poets, 

here's the link Verse-Virtual