Welcome back to the Daily Poem here on the Close Reeds Podcast Network. I'm David Kern.

Today's February 12th, 2020, and the poem that I'm going to read to you today is by Morris Manning.

It's from his new collection called Rail Splitter, and I've read a couple of poems from this collection back in the summer and the spring.

But I have yet to read this one, which is one of my favorites

in the collection. This is probably my favorite collection of poetry that came out in 2019.

If you have not got a copy yet, then I highly recommend you do so. It's very worth reading and

rereading. And the poem that I'm going to read today from this collection is called an old track in the woods.

This is how it goes.

When my melancholy was most profound in younger days, I was tempted sometimes to follow an old track in the woods and ceased to be, to disappear.

I could wander into oblivion, to live and die in the wilderness as I was accustomed

in my youth. Civilization was not my haunt. Mortality meant nothing to me when darker feelings were

overwhelming.

Why I succumb to such feelings, or nearly so, is a mystery, and remains mysterious after all these years.

I've contemplated it and can offer few conclusions.

There's darkness in the world, our common experience. We contend with it,

and we ignore it. And that was my experience. You can wander off alone and die, or you can

fight that loneliness to do something true for once with your life, or something in life can call you to it,

like making a country survive itself and leading your people through certain darkness,

and leading them even after that.

I did what I could, and doubted it.

I saw the track yet turned away.

I looked at the wilderness in the woods and went on going for a town to reach another human mind. The ambiguity of life and being alive. That is the mystery, and there's a common rhythm to it. A joy, and joy, or my perception of it, saved me.

...