Night Hike
Some friends and I climbed up the mountain, through
the rhododendron leaves, along a winding
crowded path choked with stones and languid vines.
We stumbled in the midnight air, beneath
cicada screams ringing through the hemlock trees.
We’d lost the trail, the cell phone signals long
before. We shone their dying lights on rocky
ground, small beacons in the forest night.
The moon was hidden when the path sank down
and plunged through ferns and bracken, twisting in
the dark. And I imagined that we climbed
in a dense primeval wood, even before
the cave men in their mammoth skins had found
the gods of flame and ash, before they painted
on wet cave walls with pigments made of berries,
their fingers arcing over stone. And then
the path rose up, bent sharp and wrapped around
the mountain’s curve, until we stood, our faces damp,
beneath the slowly blinking radio tower lights.