it felt good to leave the tourists behind ---with their cast-iron grated stairs and photo-flashing-falls, question-comments cookie-cut--- embrace the woods: soaking wet approach, brinks of shivers in the dripping wind, an old, broken filter slurping bubbles from a cardboard tired puddle; whisperlite stove finally working, the first cous-cous dinner warms our little white dog dreaming on my rising falling chest pressed by sleeping bag and snort and sigh; we sleep our psoas sore-- unknowing we have just begun... haven't yet begun! yet bodied abject pain to shock our senseless raw with scoured glimmer-vasts of love beneath a frozen fly on Frosty Mountain zippered hail in midnight breath, i *** in numbness gusts-- i bite my smile ice, whoop the sleeting world for we are here at last.