Leonore Wilson
Their Genesis
Fog swaddles the pastures, a white film, slub silk
like the creamy net vernix
that once covered my sons
as I cover them now,
mature men who sleep with their loves
in front of the fire where the wet jaggy
boughs have bled to ash; how I want them to stay
soft-lunged, flecked
with insoluble brilliance
on this Christmas dawn; oh what I would
do to keep everyone lulled by quiet, as I light a candle
like a high-masted thing
and perch on the compound steps, staring out
over the fertile patch of my living room
counting the crowning heads
as if I birthed all of them, but maybe
I did as certainly as I formed
the homemade bread in the bowl, set
the cast-iron pot of milk on the stove
and stirred in the teaspoons
of salt and honey, the fine cocoa, maybe
in my inner silence when I walked
the wooded trails at night, a doleful girl
at the beginning of
womanhood, they were the bat thumps
I heard; those voices, ascetic. Dependable
caught inside the burning bush.
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, Quarterly West, and others. Her historic cattle ranch and family home in Napa Valley were recently destroyed in the LNU fire.