Erin Wilson
—
Lesson
I would learn to read the residue
of your gestures, gestate their import,
porting meaning to untrammeled places,
spaces still unspoken for, they are for
the fleetingness of air, the hand-sign
of what’s left, the cleft between the hour
and our dreaming of some wedge
to keep us still, will this be willed
in another place where the tumbled-down
stones come to rest at our feet, the offbeat
strumming of our hair, we formed our loss
from what we’d gained, set fire to the house
of grieving, breathing in the fumes, this was
the secret of our vanishment, the banishing
of the times we held on, held to each other
the drift of our warmth, as if it would stay.
The New Mythology
“We are consumed by rationalism, but yearn for the Great Myth...”
Anna Kamienska
Our hands love wood grain
and the names of flowers.
We elect crows as mayors.
We exalt the saint-faced heron as sovereign.
We sleep soundly on corncob beds.
Foxes walk us wearing velvet collars.
We forswear being masters,
longing instead
for the ecstasy
of chlorophylled hours.
Erin Wilson's poems have recently appeared or are forthcoming in Chiron Review, Berkeley Poetry Review, Lake Effect, Verse Daily, and Pembroke. Her first collection is At Home with Disquiet; her second, Blue (whose title poem won a Pushcart), is about depression, grief, and the transformative power of art. She lives in a small town on Robinson-Huron Treaty Territory in Northern Ontario, Canada, the traditional lands of the Anishnawbek, devoted to a handful of things, all of them poetry.
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