Coast Trail
for Fred and Betty Crews
You should know that a little way
ahead of you on the trail
there is a dead man
The wife and daughter
are waiting for the helicopter to come
or maybe horses
They are not in need
and the best thing
is not to disturb them
said the hiker
and we continued south
still watching out for sea lions
naming the aromatic plants
to avoid both speech and silence
the more stilted our words became
the more one had a sense
they were being recorded
until it was with relief
to see the woman's white hat
just over the gentle grade
the kind of innocent sunhat
I wore when I was seven
in fields of asters like this one
she and her daughter staring
up at the severe hillcrest
not at the sunlit blue sea behind them
with its frilly white waves
not at the slack body
in its store-new shirt and levis
the jaunty cloth cap covering
all but a strip of the
abalone-grey neck
our clumsy boots swerved
off the trail to avoid
as we pretended
we had somewhere else
to get to
From: Crossing Borders (Selected Shorter Poems), NDP, New York 1994.