It helped that it was windy.
It helped that Tchaikovsky’s “Liturgy of St. John Chrysostom” was playing on my car stereo.
It helped that a vulture was sweeping low over the river’s edge.
It helped that a doe, shy-eyed, yet acutely amplified in body, was stepping into a clearing.
It helped that seagulls, newly arrived back after a long and trying winter, were lowering their legs,
curving their wings, carving air, what is most often overlooked as ordinary.
It helped that my skin was soft from an earlier lingering of love-making.
It helped that huge swathes of cloud and sun were alternating in the sky,
and that light and shadow were falling in kind on the pale blonde fields below.
A farmer drove a tractor down a line, bisecting the fields, dispersing (I didn’t know which)
fertilizer, seed, or pesticide — and perhaps even my ignorance helped.
Erin Wilson‘s poems have recently appeared or are forthcoming in The Shore, The South Carolina Review, CV2, Channel Magazine, The Inflectionist Review, and in numerous other publications and anthologies internationally. Her first collection is At Home with Disquiet. She lives in a small town on Robinson-Huron Treaty territory in Northern Ontario, the traditional lands of the Anishnawbek.