Carol Peters

Muir's Walk
     -- found in A Thousand-Mile Walk to the Gulf by John Muir

I almost forgot at times
that the glassy, treeless country
was forbidden
to walkers.
How delightful it would be
to ramble over it on foot, enjoying
the transparent
crystal ground, and the music
of its rising and falling hillocks,
unmarred
by the ropes and spars
of a ship; to study the plants
of these waving plains
and their stream-
currents; to sleep
in wild weather
in a bed of phosphorescent
wave-foam, or briny scented
seaweeds;
to see
the fishes by night
in pathways of phosphorescent light;
to walk
the glassy plain in calm,
with birds and flocks
of glittering flying fishes
here and there,
or by night
with every star
pictured in its bosom.