by Maureen Alsop

Families, a thing of water from the beginning, are an ancient fog we carry downhill as we gather light.

You were patient with who I would be, you remembered the small wood objects, the talk of the wet ground. So much weather leaving the forest. Daylight wherein there was order. Pilgrim objects, dreamy star objects, an incredible prodigy of objects being taken together into wet exile.

I am as I thought you were, alone. But not as alone you thought, and as I thought I settled on the effects of what you carried: childhood, benign shipwrecks, a ringing under a council of fern. You were a congregate wonder, a series of small edicts, savage with remembering. The whitewashed lake firm in my hand. Hardly would there ever be another dream that I too am a kind of object amid that feathery aching heavenward.

Maureen Alsop, Ph.D. is the author of two full collections of poetry, Mantic, and Apparition Wren, and several chapbooks. New poems have recently appeared or are forthcoming at TAB: The Journal of Poetry & Poetics, ditch, Meanjin, Baltimore Review, and Verse Daily.