The Toll

We feel welcome, at ease
to familiarize ourselves with
yet another landscape of nature's
grand theatre. Above loom mountains
and here, where we have entered
stage left, old hemlock and pine,
oak and maple, understoried by
dogwood and ferns. The clamour of
a mountain stream rushing down the
mountainside, gushing over and
between boulders where moss grips
tightly; there rise clouds of blackflies
on their mission of unwelcome
flesh extraction, a toll of passage.