for Jim

I think that there is a spirit of place, a presence asking to be expressed; and sometimes when we are lucky as writers, and quiet in a way few of us want to be anymore, a voice enters our own . . .

- John Haines

Sometimes the woods at night are entered into

By coming just to the edge of what you can hear,

When to go farther would be to enter only almost

Silence, the only sounds your own no matter

How lightly you try to place your two feet where

Four have gone ahead of you so quietly not a leaf

Or branch turns from its place to tell you where.

It is then you stop and then go on into listening,

And if you hold perfectly still, completely there,

An owl will call, or a nighthawk, and soon after

A call within a call deeper in the darkness, not

An answer but the passage of one life entering

Into another, passing into presence, into yours.