Erin Wilson

Raft

It’s almost like it’s not my own memory
but borrowed from someone else, who in turn
had to rent it. We were maybe twelve,
my best friend and me, tied into our seat belts,
jostling along together in the backseat of her parents’
wood panelled Ford station wagon. The gravel road,
because we were not familiar with it, went on for hours,
and is still vibrating a part of me that remains tethered.

The road, as we travelled, narrowed,
and the overhanging fringe of the Boreal Forest
gently drew closed her jowls around us.
Her mouth was damp and smelled exquisitely of moss.
We snuggled into what remained familiar of our old selves,
and peered forward through the bug-splattered windshield,
with fear and curiosity.

To one last dying crunch of gravel
they parked the car in a rudimentary clearing
which, for the week, housed our slightly derelict wooden cabin.
As though the cabin were only cursory, beside that
the larger expanse, Lake Manitou, shone in the sun,
a vast, dented and fire-stained aluminum pan,
the small black raft floating upon the hackled shining waters
beckoning us to it, the flat floating conveyance pupil-like,
hovering densely and loosely over depths,
beneath depths.

Erin Wilson‘s poems have appeared in or are forthcoming in Poetry Ireland Review, Envoi, Kestrel, A Journal of Literature and Art, On the Seawall, The Honest Ulsterman, The Adirondack Review, Natural Bridge, and elsewhere. For a while, she and her husband, also a writer, owned a farmhouse in Wabash, Indiana. They now live and write in a small town in northern Ontario, Canada.