Rocco de Giacomo writes

Lost

When you get back to the campgrounds,

you’ll have a hot shower and cook

some rotini with canned mushroom sauce,

sprinkled generously with pepper.

And on the way to Nipigon tomorrow, you’ll

sip earth-black coffee and listen to the conclusion

of Smilla’s Sense of Snow, on tape.

You try this line of reasoning,

but the trail takes you with its logic:

a phantom limb, the wet spreading blindly

through your clothes, grazing the skin: the memory

of fire, and trees upended like torn dresses,

the stutter of branches, the strangle of vines:

before you know it, you’ve been caught

in a drowning of such faith, that when it ends

at the edge of a lake, a small part of you, a candle  

in bone, is sure that this is where you

ought to be. Of course, it is only a mirror

at the end of a dark hallway, a glimmer

of false dawn: dinner tonight, Nipigon tomorrow

are the itch in your throat now; and the hunting lodge

half-eaten by moss and the fire-tower scorched

by rust are barely biblical, little hands that point.

But the long heavy growl, the glyphic movement

in the undergrowth is your revelation, a language

of tongues broken by its own harshness, the scrawl

of the infinite, scratched in the leaves.