Loose Treads
I go out walking
without asking what it will give me.
The street keeps its answers
until my shoes are done speaking.
My feet know first.
My thoughts keep interrupting.
When they finally tire,
gravel clears its throat,
a leaf waves its fall.
The breeze edits my breath—
a hand across the face of a page—
dusted with olive grit and chalky streets,
never trying to persuade.
Once, on the Camino de Santiago,
I learned the small hinge
between going somewhere
and moving as if underwater—
buen camino repeating mouth to mouth,
breathed like a passing cloud.
I am not arriving.
I am being released.
I am being revised
by what refuses to explain itself—
keeping me, without asking my name.
The sidewalk asks very little:
watch without holding,
move without taking.
Each step thins the body’s claim.
A bird cuts the air—
brief as breath—and I let it go
without handing me a lesson.
I feel recognized—
by the shared lift of hands, strangers stepping wise.
What loosens is not the body
but the hunger itself—to be elsewhere.
I walk long enough
for purpose to fall behind,
long enough for the world
to stop making its case.
When I return,
nothing is different.
Except my joints remember ease,
my mind, released.
