North from the Alaska Range
North from the Alaska Range, peaks are a notch under.
Excess mounds of reddish land, the aged flesh of Earth,
Preserve a green with alder thickets burst asunder.
And winding through those rolling hills, a no man's berth,
The Stampede Trail ends at a fatal blunder.
A long abandoned strand, an ancient endeavor's tomb,
The path scales the unbound—rough rivers, no bridges in sight.
One could spot the zigzag tracks and the mud they exhumed,
Extending to the clearing where nature does smite
The rugged inhabitants of bus one-forty-two.
Like a flag to surrender, the leg warmer flutters,
Marking the rusted framework and webbed windowpanes.
Drip drops from watered eyelids and lips that sputter
Emanate from the corpse of a man once in strain,
Along with any final words he may have uttered.
In the steel structure, the home of his livelihood,
Paperback books, jeans, a Remington rifle and its rounds.
Through a back window above a stump of rotten wood
A decomposed body and the sleeping bag it is bound,
Like a roaming wanderer might wear a shredded hood.
The back door is ajar; on it, a distressful note.
Chris McCandless held on to every single breath
With sluggish hands and tight, tidy scribbles, he wrote
About desperation and fear of an imminent death.
North from the Alaska Range, last breaths escaped his dry throat.
