Another Walk Poem by James Walter Orr

I walk again this wooded pathway where
we strolled together, in that long ago.
Things look so different through two pair of eyes,
and feel so different through completing souls.
The scent of woodland flowers in the air,
then painted sensual textures on our skin.
I thrilled as my arm brushed against your own,
and when you turned your face up toward my lips.
You smiled so sweetly at the things I said;
the fragrance of your breath out-did the rose.
A soft breeze drifted past us, and your hair
caressed my face, and lit some inner flame.
Westward, the sky showed lightning’s soft display,
and thunder rolled and rumbled ‘cross the way.

I bent my head. You offered me your mouth.
Oh, what a flood of feeling touched our soul,
but yet another flood came o’er our skin,
as nature opened wide the heaven’s gates,
burst open clouds, and water fell in sheets.
The cabin of a trapper, long since dead,
lay just across the creek and offered us
some shelter from the storm that raged around,
as though each demon strove to rip our clothes
from our wet skin, now suddenly so cold,
that goose bumps chased the color from our skin,
and made our teeth to speak like castanets.
A flash flood tore with fury down the stream
and made a nightmare from a pleasant dream.

The stream, now with a river’s mighty force,
tore trees from banks, and boulders from their rest.
Hail cracked the hand hewed shakes upon the roof,
imparting autumn’s cold upon our wet
and shivering skin, and killed our will to speak.
The one room cabin with attached lean-to
contained the remnants of a bear-skin rug.
My numb and shivering hands could scarcely move
to help you shed your wet and dripping dress,
and my own shirt and pants, but shed we did,
and wound ourselves together in the skin,
where soon we found the chill was past and gone.
Oh, how the temperature of life can change,
In ways exciting, sensuous and strange.

Oh, how the years can flee across one’s life!
Oh, how the ones we love can fade away,
through times erosion, as the years we have,
become the years we had, and never can
be reclaimed, as the starry galaxies,
still wheel, unchanged, across the empty sky.
How cold this path becomes, as I, alone
now walk the paths we walked so long ago.
The rounded mound of earth I stood before,
as liquid grief streamed down my chiseled face
and wet the clods, beneath which now you lie:
My sweetheart, wife, and soul mate from that day.
I see one lonely hawk against the sky.
He shares the solitude, in which I cry.