Touching Angels
/Erin Wilson
I want to live
in a ramshackle shack
that touches—hyper-touches—
air, and have that shanty
startle back
like a child that has lured
and then touched a snake.
I want birch trees to mean
something to the utensils I use.
I want my spoon to have,
beneath the happy that it is,
a proper volume of vital sadness.
I want drakes, whippoorwills and meadow larks
to wheel in my dreams,
warbling their declarations and afflictions
amidst the woody rabble,
tearing thorns from the matte-brown
walls of this apartment block.
I want to learn to be so still
the hawk,
bound in its ancestral feathered mask,
will rise
god-like
from a glade,
to glide close over me,
perusing my ribs
like aisles in a grocery store.
I want to be attuned with the languages
of grasses, the harmony of culling.
Even for just one season
I want to be absolutely inside the pagan architecture
of summer.
The acrid stench of burning toast
will be no person's cataclysm,
only a strange galvanizing force
sent out by something ablaze, not someone next door,
for there will be no neighbours.
From my roots, I will listen hard to understand,
then leaning forward, listen harder,
and disappear through a hole in the night.
Author’s Note: This poem was written one summer from a ditch on a back road in rural Ontario. I would drop my son off for work and take refuge at this out-of-the-way place until it was time for me to start work. Standing there, on the side of the road in the early morning light, as away from people as I could manage on such a schedule, I was nearly rent with longing to be there more. It seemed like the cells of my body vibrated with the same intensity and desire as viper's bugloss, trefoil, chicory. The animals seemed separated from me by only the thinnest veil. I wanted absolute knowledge. What could possibly be enough? I wanted to explode into light, become absorbed into darkness.
Erin Wilson's poems have recently appeared or are forthcoming in Reed Magazine, The South Carolina Review, CV2, The Emerson Review, and in numerous other publications and anthologies internationally. Her first collection is At Home with Disquiet; her second, Blue, is forthcoming (both from Circling Rivers Press). She lives in a small town on Robinson-Huron Treaty territory in Northern Ontario, the traditional lands of the Anishnawbek.
