Uless

Lichen bristled spruce, thimbleberries near
the last ice. I drank from a stream cured by rock.
I had never seen water like that, clarion,

jugging some for the cabin. Sometimes, I’d wake
and from the window watch a moose chew foliage.
I wondered about mountain lions, about my father

who often slept outside in a tent near an old mining town.
When I looked for him one day, I thought of the argument
that the only thing bigger than a God we imagine is a God

who exists. It doesn’t work—or maybe works better—
if we say the only thing bigger than a life we imagine
is a life that exists. I found a boulder rippled by moss,

and rolled from the adit, cragged and wreathed
with more moss. I thought the dark was like a maw,
like a bear, that it was a cave. I wanted it to be a cave.

My father returned, trudging from a peak, his face
sunburnt, clear-eyed, and said there was sleet last night.
And had I ever seen dawn, up close, after sleet?

Nel

Beyond the rattlesnake weed was a yard hectic with dragonflies,
which we watched from the boat where once we found a copper

underwing that seemed like a gut unspooled. Our engine had caught
rugged in the swamp grass, though we did get to the clearing ringed

by tupelos, some bent or arched, these shapes doubling in the water,
appearing like a ribbed hull. From this wood, your father used to carve

wildfowl, a set of Canada geese tipped like teapots in the sedge.
I never told you this, but one night I rowed to the cypresses

near the drawbridge where I saw him kneeling in his skiff, one oar jutting
like a femur from the mud. He stood as if to declare something and stayed

that way, the moon over his right shoulder. Were we around nine or ten
when he called us to swing on the cherry picker, a seat roped from the boom?

And he said it would all be fine, like casting a line in the river, maybe
the Vermillion whose course sometimes floods northward after a glut

of rain. Around there, he once found a bee nest in a tree hollow, a fermented
wound of propolis and honey, the insects pungent, the smell of crawling,

of larvae, of sweet infected rot. He mentioned we might find some trunk
overgrown with bees, so we went to the woods where he climbed a sweetgum,

dropping its morning star-like seeds on our heads, and then he tried an oak,
pretending to stick his fist into a frantic slew of stingers, and we laughed,

but he stayed there for too long, which made us wonder if he knew
how to get down, if he knew the way back in the dark,

if the tree would let him back, and soon we barely saw his boots,
and soon there were only the leaves, and soon it would be autumn,

a warm November, and you would watch from your bedroom window
as geese took flight from a slim crook of shore.

Burnside Soleil grew up in a houseboat on the bayou but these days is a pilgrim in New Orleans. His work has appeared or is forthcoming in Kenyon Review, New England Review, and elsewhere.

Published July 15 2023