The Garden of Verse: Let's Take a Different Path Through the Woods This Time, What Can Possibly Happen? "Lost Again" in December's Verse-Virtual

Here's my poem on what happens when we decide to take a little walk in a very big place, the "great" outdoors. It's one of three poems in December's Verse-Virtual that treat the pleasures and -- uh, challenges of autumn in New England... I know, the season's barely over, but I can't wait to do it again.  

 Lost Again

So here we are again, at the corner of twilight
and self-mystification
Lost again!
The road leads ever on, as I have read somewhere,
or perhaps everywhere,
and so we are always ‘someplace,’
but truly there is more elsewhere than I am ever prepared to accept or, as the man said,
dream in my philosophy
and, right now, in this moment of befuddlement
I am unable to be philosophical about all these ‘back,’ or upper, or, as other poets have called them, ‘far fields’lurking in this ‘neck’ of the woods,
though in present circumstances I believe it more accurate to say we have lost our way
in nature’s whole ‘upper digestive track.’

The hills we gaze upon from here are in all relevant respects
much the same as the hills we saw when we knew
where we were
(or thought we did)
and thus also believed we knew
where we were going
So now, of course, we bewail the absence of signage,
as if some protective, supervisory entity has let down its guard,
some divinity of open space, or god of preservation,
guidebook author to foolish mortals.

Two roads diverged – spun off? disappeared? – in a wood –
or, more accurately,
one of those gone-back, re-wilded, cut twice a year, beautifully tangled wild-thing meadows
to which we meaningfully drive, intending to be here now,
this time of year
in order to experience the magnificent fullness
of these extra-human playgrounds of plants and fungi –
and have faced not only similar choices of diverting pathways,
but this very division, a dozen times in the past,

this time choosing the other and that has made,
if not all,
then a less than truly edifying difference
as we stare at rooftops we had not known existed,
and take equally unknown paths that lead not into temptations,
but neither to familiar destinations –
culminating, as light begins to fade, in some significant agita in the body politic.Just ‘two paths in the woods’: that’s how it started,but someone has torn up the mental maps
and scattered the twisted remains beneath the table.

So: downhill, any whichway (witch-way?) now,
discovering hermit huts that do not appear in our previous reckoning of our universe,
places without names,
esplanades of trees wholly unmarred by human use
until, at last, the fallen world descends to a ruggedly paved road
suggesting, unmistakably, the haunts of humans,
perhaps sensible ones, though none we know.
Yet, following this clue offered by the fullness of time and Earth,
the declining day comes down to an honestly car-riven road of a night-purple hueand so we face the final existential quandary: right or left?

How will the body politic decide?
The sensible party flags down a shiny vehicle,
its elderly and (happily for us) local occupants point the way,
and so, not altogether hopelessly lost in the end,
we are but merely, temporarily, misplaced.

And in response to the query our inner taskmaster,
and disappointed life coach, inevitably poses
by means of that age-old harpy voice:
‘What have you learned from this disturbance?’
we may boldly reply,
‘At least we were together.’
To see my other two poems in this issue and samplethe work of some fifty other poets, here's the link Verse-Virtual