Mother,
Lindsay Wilson
Today I rise early to walk
the dog along the river,
restless and looking for whatever
the world will give: half-filled jar
of salmon eggs, broken antler,
a tripwire fishing line I pull up
and follow to a landlocked pool,
filled by a spring flood, then abandoned,
destined, by early summer, to dry up.
At the sound of my feet a school
of minnows startles out of their stillness,
and when I drop in a pink egg, they return
like my grief under the netted shadows
of the cottonwoods, exposed
in their appetite. I am training
my grief to rise from the shallows
for each bright egg, but even after
the jar empties, all those little mouths
still blindly bite at the surface.
LINDSAY WILSON, an English professor at Truckee Meadows Community College, co-edits the literary journal, The Meadow. His book, No Elegies, won the Quercus Review Press Spring Book Award (due out in 2015), and his poetry has appeared in The Bellevue Literary Review, Pank, The Minnesota Review, Verse Daily, and The Portland Review. Lindsay’s mother made an appearance in The Road issue of Sundog Lit in my father’s photograph, Beatty, Nevada.