Green Linden Press

Almost

i.

Just past middle age,
is there a name for that,
a time to denote just after the crisis?

No, no word for that.

However,
the broad-stroked
musculature of the woodpecker
comes to mind,

or rather its lunatic red crest, watery stroke
and then its

just after—

ii.

Remember when you were younger and you were the key?

Remember feeling a thin pastel cylinder of dawn
over a lake
spinning like a wedding ring?

Remember the loon's cry?
Remember longing for it?

Remember being surprised when you yourself uttered it?

But also—not totally surprised.

iii.

Speaking of art
(we were just reminiscing about the Chicago Art Institute
and how you were so sleep-deprived it was hard to make sense of anything,
but Whistler's muted Nocturne: Blue and Gold—Southampton Water,
still washes up at our feet),
when you look down,
Misery Bay in May,
not yet warm, everything wan:
beach sand, alvars, water,
everything's colour draining: a careful show of a well-worked elbow of driftwood,
the wretched stippling of creeping juniper,
bleached nearly bone-white crayfish legs
unattached to one another
but raised upon the glacial beach
as though praising.

In one ear, total absolution of waves.
In the other, a piquing of cedar trees at first blush empty,
but because of the clandestine clay-coloured sparrows—
singing.

iv.

You're almost fifty.
If we're being honest,
more than half-done,
and if nothing else, we try to be honest.

Here, upon your horizon, your pale halo of sky again,

the thinnest rim,

and then Georgian Bay
with its only slightly more brooding tincture,

another fringe,

and then grykes and dolostone pavements.

Infinity is out there, Erin.

You grab your collar closed around you.
You're cold.

Nearer, inside your scarf's loop,
infinity's in here, too.

And inside infinity?

You are married to it. Whatever it is.
You are married to it.
And you must make it speak.

"Almost" is from Erin Wilson’s recent book At Home with Disquiet, © 2020.
Reprinted by permission of Circling Rivers Press.

Erin Wilson's poems have appeared in or are forthcoming in Salamander Magazine, Pembroke Magazine, The Connecticut River Review, Poetry Ireland Review, The Honest Ulsterman, The Adirondack Review, and elsewhere. Her first collection, At Home with Disquiet, has been newly released this year with Circling Rivers Press. She lives and writes in a small town in northern Ontario, Canada.  

ISSN 2472-338X
© 2020