Hiking Cadillac Mountain at Sunrise
For Rob Orrison
So much of it I don’t remember
except of course that you were alive
then, groom on his honeymoon and all of us
hungover and was it a gift to the bride?
She stopping in mid-hike, needing to be
whispered to convincingly continue—
the rest of us bewildered that you
could find the blue marks up the trail
in the pre-dawn dark merely with flashlight
to guide us. But on the way back down
you kept getting us lost: the whole mountain
in a daze of dayness, the blue marks disappearing
like breath. So we all wandered among
the boulders for a tired time, all of us bleary,
all of us in some kind of shared nuptial bliss.
*
Carol Berg’s poems are forthcoming or in Gyroscope, Crab Creek Review (Poetry Finalist 2017), DMQ Review, Hospital Drive (Contest Runner-Up 2017), Sou’wester, Spillway, Redactions, Radar Poetry, and Up the Staircase Quarterly. Her chapbooks, Her Vena Amoris (Red Bird Chapbooks), and “Self-Portraits” in Ides (Silver Birch Press) are available. Her poems have been nominated for Pushcart Prizes and Best of the Net. She was winner of a scholarship to Poets on the Coast and a recipient of a Finalist Grant from the Massachusetts Cultural Council.
