That’s what I was doing on a Wednesday morning,
while out on Falls Road, slogging my slow way
through a foot of sodden snow, when suddenly
I felt exalted by a trail my dog and I had sighted:
deep pug marks whose petalled toes were blurred
by thick winter fur, and which raced before us
in bounding gaps, straight lines, staggered pairs.
I knew something was up when Sam’s coat rose
stiffly off his back, his ears and nostrils flaring.
A mountain lion had prefaced us hours earlier,
had climbed past the same outcroppings of granite,
had paused, like us, on edges of icy precipices,
to stare far below to the ski lift parking lot,
where colorful toy cars were aligned in rows,
and where beetle-sized skiers queued up for rides.
We followed the puma’s prints for more than a mile,
and so bent was I to my trail that I wholly forgot
to be mindful of other pleasures, other dangers:
for suddenly, above us, the mountainside we hugged
bellowed, buckled, loosened, a thousand tons of snow
that roared down upon us a white, cataclysmic fury—
we ran, and ran and ran—then stopped to cringe
behind a boat-shaped boulder that, like a huge wall,
broke the raging avalanche into twin Amazons of death.
Like two twigs trapped in the calm, unseeing eye
of a tornado, we stood transfixed as the mountain
shuddered free its oceanic cargo, its cosmic freight,
the noise so deafening it drowned out the dog’s howl.
My hand still holds that awful sound in its bones:
my hand's trembling even now; it is writing down
this poem, so that all of me flinches to remember
what I nearly surrendered one day in early March,
when I lost track of the wildness of the world.