Pilgrimage

Six days a week, this solo pilgrimage
across the wildnerness
of weedy sloughs
and uphill root-snares and dead-lightning limbs
to the mailbox,
celestial castle on the hill,
a shining silver roadside barrel vault
with a bloody flag
recently lowered
and a drawbridge I let down while lifting out
my daily bread,
the world’s delivered words
I bear back to the house along a path
my feet have carved
into the local earth
for decades now and know so well they could
tightrope its shallow gulley in the dark.