I've hiked the Long Trail for 35 years.  When I hike alone, for solitude and meditative connection to wilderness, I often compose a poem and leave it at one of the shelters under my trail name, Mountain Poet.  Here's one I wrote last autumn:

AUTUMN / M.C. ESCHER

September 25, 2009

The Long Trail
Clarendon Shelter & Swansong Shelter (The "Secret" Shelter)

Spectral foliage floats
on a breeze from an azure sky,
M.C. Escher mosaics of leaves under foot.
Mezzo-throated thrush
sings only to me
(maybe it's true.)
Many springs and summers
I have walked these mountains.
Now it is my autumn
and these vistas are memoir.
Color where once was only green,
patterns evolving, seasonal, recurring
yet unique, like fractal bits
that contain a universe.
Nothing stays as it seems
visual tricks, transitions,
painful and amusing,
as if one of our Gods
perceives us as billions of
M.C. Escher's September leaves
that morph into birds
and fly off the woodcut's edge.

 

- Jack Mayer

Middlebury, Vermont