Fugitive Hikers, Canimus

Pick your poison, Fate or Fortune,
Stoic or Epicurean, Einstein or Copenhagen,
Geometer or probalist—or resist. Resist.

Whose was the soul that Virgil plucked
From the frozen pit with yet no Judas in it
To bring to grotesque and furious Erichtho?

Wouldn’t you like to know? Woodpecker
Pounds the dead ponderosa branch above
The wayside hermit’s head. The ground

Below rumbles from somewhere down
In the valley of houses, a small earthquake
Or the sonic boom of a military jet

Rehearsing for eventualities irrelevant
To a plague spread by human contact.
Well, you can’t plan for everything, so

You plan for nothing much in the hope
Nothing much surprises you, which
It must do. Pick your poison or refuse to.

Refuse. Open a vein until your limbs go
Cold, until you can’t compose yourself
Anymore. Then quote yourself on your way

Out the door. The wayside is no longer
Safe for a hermit to wait beside. Or is it?
The inability to decide is the last defiance.

First the way will see its share of lesser evils
In the form of fortune’s more usual fools,
The loud visitors and the self-convinced

No harm could possibly come to them.
The grim police of fate come later, always
A bit too pious, a little too late, but forceful.

The wayside hermit waits. The woodpecker
Has moved on with the bluebirds and a jay.
Desperate tourists with nowhere left to go

Cram their trucks and campers against
A high-country snow-berm blocking
Higher country up the road. Every lockdown

Leads to jams at the exits, doesn’t matter
If it’s war or natural disaster chasing them,
Herculaneum, airports, mountain passes—

Humans head for the narrowest gates
Of escape as instinctively as mice head
For apertures. You could maybe wait. Wait.

A truck built for apocalypse—gun rack,
Jerry cans, solar panels, high clearance—
Has tried to go higher, up over and beyond

The berm. It returns. The day hikers
From wherever they escaped to get here,
Noisy as migratory terns, haven’t returned.

The wayside hermit waits. Fortune is fate—
Two faces. One you can augur with odds,
One you never can argue with. The same.

Neither wilderness nor the middle way will
Save you from the choice of them. Shall
You withdraw by ascending or descending

With them? A brightly colored motley
Group of feckless bicyclists on vacation,
Feeling their own health as earned by them,

Not to be sent home by narrowing options,
Also pedal up the mountain to the berm,
Chatting. What is life without conversation?

The fugitive hikers return. The trail ran out
Or their legs tired out. They pile back
Inside their trucks and head back down

To the half-closed desert towns. Probably,
Whispers the Bayesian, no real harm,
No sickness will come for the likes of them.

Still, wouldn’t you like to know? Not just
How many, the counts and percentages,
Not just almost emotive media anecdotes,

But who, passing you midway, going up,
Heading down, confident or frantic
In their inevitably failed escape, escaped?

Was there ever such a regular customer
Of the underworld, such a katachthonion
Tour guide and eager errand boy as Virgil?

Who will he accompany now up or down,
Who will he get sent to fetch next? Which
Would be the safest way to wait and rest

Without getting made in the shade?
The wayside hermit can’t seem to decide
Which is best. Which is best.