All Text, Music, and Illustrations, including Paintings, Photographs, and 3D models, Copyright © 2022 by Jim Robbins.

Ancient Trail

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THE ANCIENT WEB

I park near a load of rubbish
dumped by the road, and, struggling
up a hillside, follow a path not sure
it is thousands of years old, but finding

destinations, the leaves of sycamores
floating onto pounding stones
or into the stream where they are dragged
along by the current and sucked under.

By the pounding stone, a lip
of earth extends from the slope,
large enough for a bed.
A house pit? Below that,

rocks stacked on
each other--a miner's grave?
Beyond the creek, five trails
join at a hub between the river

and the creek, where a rancher
dropped blocks of salt, the questions
asked a moment before lost
in the grass, empty in the curl

of a leaf. According to mystics
the ether contains records
of every moment within eternity,
a memory of every individual

experience within the physical
plane. Somehow I know where
to find the pounding stones
and house pits and trails

along the creeks, as though some
inner sight has been granted me--
a man powerless, gauche,
and unworthy. Wildcat Mountain

looms in the distance from many points
of the ancient trails, the distance
undisturbed, no one approaching
with news of forces sent to capture me

or drive me off the land,
the mansions planned
for forty acre lots. I dig
into mortars brimming

with grass and earth, the dry
oak leaves needling my fingers,
the pounding stones deep
as icebergs, the air, smelling

of rain, still in the quiet woods.
I find a pestle and turn
the tapered end
toward the hub. This web

once kept a community
alive, yet I
am lost, searching
the valley for signs

of the city in the smog
and finding none, nothing keeping
the rancher from selling off
to some developer, the trails,

snaking between buckeyes
and oaks, etched for thousands
of years in the earth, always
vanishing in the grass.