Robin Chapman: “Time Travel”
TIME TRAVEL
We’re hiking Pheasant Branch, the circle route,
bundled up in wool in January weather, boots
gripper-shod to clutch snow frozen underfoot,
trekking poles splayed to steady forward progress,
hungry for talk in the wind that ices our voices—
raspy from shut-in silence and pandemic stress—
our trail exchanges not of daily news (what news?)
but skips across slow time and space—Great Wars
and the Great Depression, Webb telescope in place,
unfurled only yesterday—how now we will peer
at the earliest stars beginning their blazing lives,
gone now perhaps, till we’re brought back to earth
at the Sacred Springs, water burbling out of sand
in rippling boils, tracks of our unseen companions,
the multiplying mid-west turkeys, trampled all around
in their search for winter water, green water cress.
Panic Season (Tebot Bach) is Robin Chapman’s eleventh book of poems. She is a recipient of Appalachia’s 2010 Helen Howe Poetry Prize. Her poems have appeared recently in Alaska Quarterly Review, Hudson Review, and online in Verse-Virtual.