On the Trail to Hidden Lake from Logan Pass Visitor’s Center

Under an empty sky and blank rock,
a thousand little fragments trudge
along a plank path to appreciate what
is hidden. Are there billy goat trolls
hidden under this bridge to beyond?
Something always is hidden beneath
or beyond belief.

Under the hollow path is nothing
but shadow and the clomp
of a thousand fragments of belief
trudging, a nothing as nothing as the rock
that cuts the sky, as void
as ice that hollowed it.

And yet, hoping hidden will open
to tell a fullness beyond belief,
a thousand fragments trudge
this hollow path with what they carry:
a darkness beneath never-to-be-told,
a fret of belief of beyond, a dread
that this hollow path with its nothing,
neither troll nor gruff goat, might continue
into oblivion beyond lake’s glaze
which, even the whole so many
fragments of belief might hold, reveals
no more than a flat water reflecting
ice-void rock and sky.

On the “Trail to Hidden Lake” appears in Have, a book of poems by Lee Robison, which will be published in November 2019.

There are a couple of Hidden Lakes I know of in Montana alone, but this lake is in Glacier National Park. For those of you wishing to make the trek described in this poem, Logan Pass Visitor’s Center sits on the Continental Divide just off the Going to the Sun Road. You will not regret the journey.