Most days my practice is to walk in some part of the landscape in which I am living.  Often something will rise up on those walks, either in the natural world or in the rhythms of memory and feeling, that will become a poem.  The trail this poem describes is one I walked many times before we scattered my son’s ashes there, and one I continue to walk. I hope the poem speaks to readers who live with loss, and I hope it provides both recognition of sorrow and some kind of peace. Using the second person and making the poem an instruction is what enabled me to write it.

Patricia Wallace is a poet and critic who splits her time between of the Hudson River Valley and the high desert of Santa Fe. Some of her poems have appeared in PEN America, RockPaperPoem, River Heron, bosque, The Phare, and The North Dakota Quarterly. Her essays on poetry include chapters in Oxford’s American Literature in Transition and The Columbia History of American Poetry.