Steering wheel turns slowly,
I aim away from navigational hazards.
Captains fear icebergs;
I'm more concerned
for hidden children lurking in leaf piles.
A smart phone-entranced walker
meanders with a telling
under-the-social-influenced waddle.
A pair of leashed dogs dart close and far,
stretching on their tethers in competing directions,
unpredictably pouncing or stopping,
never in tandem.
The toddler girls down the street
(who are now, somehow, in third grade)
rush to the center of the road,
then belatedly turn their heads right
to bathe their retinas in my headlights.
I crest the hill, and with my climb
comes the plummy shroud of dwindling light
a familiar, dark embrace of the forest,
its encompassing, shielding canopy
stretching over the evening, pulling dusk closer.
On my left, gargantuan humeri
emerge from a deciduous leaf-strewn yard.
One pair of ulna and radius
root down into the mulch exerting force.
Its other arm upturned,
its skeletal phalanges outreached towards the sky.
Joining the woods in summoning the veil of night,
my bony neighbor bids me adieu.
