A hike is the first abstraction. It stirs the land
and brings a blush to the timber.

Listing like Quimper and Coimbra and Grenada
adenoidal lemons amid suaveness of leaves.

A cypress and its sidecar
carve stature out of the turbulence of the air.

Harder than anything on the scale of hardness, air:
irritant of scrimshaw, ironist of Appalachias.

Between pine fringe and palm coxcomb, sky
kayaks. Their silhouettes like mirror mitts

catch what they discard at the same time,
metonymy of the cone and prototype of the fledged.

So when my son asks where we’re going,
ingénu of predestination—I’ll hedge.