Like the two men on the dock
fishing for bass today, I’m searching
for words to swim by during this last leg
of August, this liminal space of the season
with its crickets and cool nights,
sun still following my body across
Moose Pond. I’ve been on the threshold
of a poem all week with my house open,
guests arriving and leaving, the clouds
floating over seaweed. I invited a poem
out of its exile without fanfare, like the shell
of a hermit crab and a piece of driftwood
sitting on my table, collected for winter’s gleaming
to hold the heart open to tenderness again
and again. For now I push pine needles
with my feet planted on sand, listen to the loons
speak from their world of water like the fish
willing to sacrifice themselves out of rocks’
shadows. Heaven’s details surround this cabin
with a blue kayak and a young girl jumping
for the first time in full view of her mother,
while other things hold me in a knot
with distraction like the conversation next door
or the fetus I held in my dream womb
last night—aged that I am. It wasn’t the baby
I worried about but the rebellious teenager
it would one day be. A canoe passes by
as I recall the heartburn that had begun
in night’s ethereal structure—what was I to do—
abort or keep? The grip of it all returns
as I try to hold a single thought while watching
a chipmunk cross over moss-covered roots.
I look up to see the fisherman gently
remove a hook out of a fish’s mouth
and carefully place him back in
the water. He winds the reel, casting
invisible line out into the depths.

•

Gail Hosking is the author of Snake’s Daughter: The Roads in and out of War (U of Iowa Press) and holds an MFA from Bennington College. Her poems and essays have appeared for over a decade in places like Tar River Poetry, The Florida Review, Fourth Genre, Post Road, Nimrod International, and The Chattahoochee Review. She was a finalist in the River Teeth CNF contest as well as the Iowa Review CNF contest. Her work has been anthologized as well. Her website is http://www.gailhosking.org.