As a child,
night surrounded everything outside;
even the daytime woods were wild,
no places I could hide.
Now, clumsy collisions in the dark
are mainly what I have to dread—
to stub a toe or bark
a battered shin. The dead
are closer to me now. Woodland trails,
once gained, are in the past, the roots, the rocks.
All matter threatens me travails—
a trundle down the hall in no-slip socks,
a drip and trolley at my side,
a chair, a bed the goals of day and night.
It is the errant step I must avoid.
It’s not a welcome sight.
Although a poet since his 30s, Wheelock’s intense immersion in the writing of poetry is relatively recent; his lifelong career has been in music, as a composer of chamber, vocal, and orchestral music. He is Professor Emeritus of Music at Smith College. He lives with his wife Anne in an old house at the edge of a hayfield in Whately, Massachusetts.