Persistent image from childhood:
I’m walking alone in the woods
in winter or late autumn, the snow
softly ticking down on a frozen pond.

The afternoon is waning, darkness
gathering at the edges of fields.
The flurrying grey sky lulls me
into a kind of waking dream.

Maybe I’m a Boy Scout. Maybe I’m  an
old man. Maybe I’m Ojibway 
like Bob McCann, who fed the deer
near the archery range each winter day

until he died. I’m any or all of these
and don’t need to know which. Snow covers
the fallen leaves embedded in ice.
I stand in snow, watching and listening.