STARS, SCATTERSTILL. Constellations of people and quiet.
Those nights when nothing catches, nothing also is artless.
I walked for hours in those forests, my legs a canvas of scratches,
trading on the old hopes-we were meant to be lost. But being lost
means not knowing what it means. Inside the meadow is the grass,
rich with darkness. Inside the grass is the wish to be rooted, inside the rain
the wish to dissolve. What you think you live for you may not live for.
One star goes out. One breath lifts inside a crow inside a field.

About this poem
"I wrote this poem after a three-day backpacking trip during which every possible thing went wrong. We spent 12 hours of it lost in a valley, desperate from exhaustion. At the time I was thinking about how easy it is to valorize the character-building qualities of 'not knowing what will happen' and 'being lost' when you're not actually lost."
-Joanna Klink

About Joanna Klink
Joanna Klink's forthcoming book is "Excerpts from a Secret Prophecy" (Penguin, 2015). She teaches in the M.F.A. program at the University of Montana.

***
The Academy of American Poets is a nonprofit, mission-driven organization, whose aim is to make poetry available to a wider audience. Email The Academy at poem-a-day[at]poets.org.

(c) 2014 Joanna Klink. Originally published by the Academy of American Poets, www.poets.org. Distributed by King Features Syndicate