Sarah Gilbert: "Tracks"

A quarter inch of wet March snow

each footprint on the sidewalk

clear, pressing flakes to melting

here my husband’s shoes

walking to work

there small bootprints of a school child

I follow my dog as we lap the block

her paired prints slaloming in a trot

mine pacing out behind me

and everywhere the drip prints

of tree branches, the tracks of squirrels

precise, perfect

front feet back feet as if pressed

in plaster or drawn in the guide book

by noon they’ll be gone

but for this moment they are here

crisp record of the morning

and I am here to witness

"Tracks" by Sarah Gilbert. Text as posted on Your Daily Poem (3/02/2014).

Art credit: Photograph by Annette Gendler, from her blog post entitled "Those Who Trod Before Me" (1/15/2015).  An excerpt, remarkably resonant with this poem: "A freshly snowed-on sidewalk reveals who has walked before us. I never quite appreciated that until yesterday morning.... As I walked along. listening to the squish of the snow under my boots, I looked more closely at the footsteps on the sidewalk in front of me. Someone had walked his or her dog; paw prints ran parallel to adult footsteps, except when they didn't.... And somehow this revealing capacity of snow made me happy because it was something that could only be experienced in that very moment with the snow thin enough to give prominence to the footsteps, and the salt still at bay."