Leonore Wilson

 

Leonore Wilson is a college English and creative writing teacher from Northern California. She is on the MFA Board at St Mary’s College of California. Her poetry books are Western Solstice (Hireath Press) and Tremendum, Augustum (Kelsey Press). Leonore’s work has been in The Iowa Review, Unruly Catholic Women Writers, Trivia: Voices of Feminism, Third Coast, Prairie Schooner, Quarterly West, Upstreet, Madison Review, Laurel Review, Pif, etc. Her historic cattle ranch and family home in Napa Valley were recently destroyed in the LNU fire.
 

The Rock

In memory of Matthew

 

Car loads of boys drive these hot California hills, freed with the myth of promise to blaze trails through the tarnished oaks, fescue, thistle, and to hunker over fence posts, or slip through barb wire and run barefoot, wearing only swim trunks because their bodies finger the end of time--of children crying, dogs barking—meaning the luster of youth. The summer lake around them is not transparent, but absolute, dangerous; water not blue, but gray, gray water that waits like a hook; and so with nervous laughter they risk laddering up the face of the red sandstone precipice where they lose themselves in shadow though they have heard about its legend, the way sudden protuberances gun out when you jump, and how some boys’ chests have been permanently scarred, how others….No, they put down these rumors, the echoing words can no longer reach them, not these who readily wait, daring each other in an afternoon humming with insects, when ski-boats drone and skim prows, and when girls in flowered bikinis flick cigarettes; jewels of girls held captive, parched and wanton, who wait among the cattails ands shallows filling their libidinous glances, ready to drop their tops so one boy will actually catapult off (dive, somersault, cannonball) defying what is safe, expected, ordinary; doing what the heroic must do—risking life to rest among gods.

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The Roses

 

Against the window will not bloom—

they see us face to face, bellies, hips, thighs,

leg over leg like bent blossoms;

they see us in the early morning devoted to union;

as if the rain and mist of our song could hover

in mid-air like the eight string burgeoning

of the thrush’s voice, or the fecund

blending of the summer grasses as they bend

and roll in the threshing tail

of a strong north wind; the roses

would climb halfway up the trellis

and hang, as if suspended there,

voyeurs arched high, bewildered,

peering like children seeing sex

for the first time, shaken awake, hearing

heaven itself twisting and moaning, a cry

in the far shed of dawn when sperm and egg

met, when their parents’ blood

flowed backwards as it did once

into their own soft eyes.

 

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Postscript

 

The long lane curves out beside the dry meadow,

febrile puncture thistle and tarweed either side.

Leaf rot in summer ditches; embers somnolent, on the verge.

Emerald tunnel of cottonwoods and silvery willows

where the bridle path joins a highway, drops to the valley--

old bridges, stone arches, blue herons in the stream.

Out into sun again, a broad land of orchards, the long hill

upward, shadow breaking everywhere on impregnated cattle,

their big soft buffetings catching your heart off guard.

Now turn to the west, walk on into the headstrong shadow

of this self you made in the long arbitrary afternoons —

the words laid down, hand flat on the mahogany table.

Then finally, there up ahead, familial Ithaca of stars.

Black steppe of time, sable heft of glory — you turn,

down the broad highway, clay broken road, funnelling lane,

to the house hand built of days off under high waisted trees.

Light now in the cathedral window, children’s voices; blue lamp

on the maple hutch, a glass of fine port, a fountain pen.

Blackbird rustling under the budding laurel, woodsmoke; settle

your shoulders now, lift the latch, turn the key, step in.