Solitude

Solitude

When I was nine
I learned to be alone
by walking in the woods
behind our house.

Solitude was preferable
to the tricky silences
that boobytrapped our home—
better to walk in the vast
Kabab National Forest,
that other house. 

One summer I climbed
high in a serious pine tree,
climbed until I could see
blue snow gracing the tops
of the far away San Francisco Peaks.

The ground below felt distant as the sky.
I was introduced to absence:
treetop to ground, ground to Peaks,
Peaks to home, home to here.

Absence is as vast
as a national forest
and more varied.

The smell of pine sap
stayed on my hands
long after I climbed down,
long after we left that house,

and long after I stopped smelling it.