Hiking the New Year 

Not bothering with resolutions, I celebrate
the New Year by hiking. I start

with the hills in the park nearby, legs burning
from doing nothing all fall, all year. Days later

I hike out to Headwaters, find myself soaked
in sweat and struggling to catch my breath

trudging up the two-mile hill above three-mile bridge.
Yesterday, I hiked out to Fern Canyon, almost

nine miles out and back under a damp gray sky.
I walked utterly alone, only a chickadee

to shape the emptiness with its song. She reminded me
of the girls in my high school choir, the ones who seemed

almost invisible with their plain faces, their dowdy clothes,
until they began to sing—and you would suddenly discover

you knew nothing about them: those living miracles.
Until then, at most you saw was your own reflection

on the surface of the waters. I don't know where a single
one of them lives now, or what they do, or who loves them,

but walking into the mist gradually dissolving into rain, I hope
they are all still singing—in the shower, at a coffee shop,

in the golden harmonies of another choir. Opening their mouths
and making everything ordinary blossom so as to awaken us all

to what we so blindly missed, resting on the foolish assumption
we already understood the universe and our pale place within it.

David Holper