A Summer Poem

East Moose Creek Trail, Selway-Bitterroot Wilderness. Photo by Joshua Doležal.

Friends,

I’m traveling with my kids for vacation this week, so I’m sharing a poem in lieu of the usual essay.

You can find more poems like this in my book Someday Johnson Creek. If you’ve read it, I’d be grateful for a review on Amazon or Goodreads.

Happy summer,

Josh

Mean

Cutting brush along a mountain trail, 
he fights two willful extremes—one desperate 
to trim back the whole hillside, shearing the bank 

straight up to the peak—the other longing 
to let the trail die, overgrowth 
smoothing the crease in the grey mountain’s brow.

How fragile the middle space 
where he clears a footpath for a time,
this labor worth most to himself,

each sweep of an arm purging dust
from his blood, and the hearth at his core
clean enough for a household of one.

“Mean” first appeared in The Hudson Review in 2006.

Read more poems from “Someday Johnson Creek” ⬇️

A rattlesnake poem

Divorce

The Skier