The tracks of whatever he’s been following end
at an abandoned mill where a river exhales
from a beaver dam, without pausing to breathe in.
He needs to retrace the waffled prints he’s stamped
on fields and pastures whose barbed fences
are drifted over, and that wind is swirling away.
He didn’t set out snowshoeing across an erased
landscape to wait beside a river while it prayed.
Its whispered breath repeats words barely said,
a sound audible only after birdsong has been
replaced by a rasp flowing under the ice.
He must have needed to stand inhaling a silence
creaking with cold, too austere for cardinal red
or the gold of finches, must have needed
to arrive at a place from which the only way back
is to have lived a life exactly as he has.