Sample Poems by Lindsay Wilson

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False Positive, Spring 2020


Above a mottled eggshell sky, we do not
deserve, and though the thyme died

this winter, I water the garden,
then carry oregano inside to make a marinade

with rosemary and bay leaf for a cheap
cut of beef. Soon, when we eat the richly rubbed

meat, Anna feverish on the couch will say,
I can't smell anything, and yet after tomorrow's

test results, we will put the leftovers
on old takeout rice and know what luck

tastes like, but that's the future tense.
Now a white boy jogs through the cul-de-sac

and no one sees criminal, and now through
the blinds the light seems to fall down like bars,

but by now we know all metaphors fail.
Prisoners don't own the keys to their cells,
so I walk right out to my lawn where
the wind drags its feet over this suddenly

green grass. The mind throws itself out
into fields like that to find its footing, but come

on now: You can't taste luck. Under
the dark eaves the new robins sing hunger

to their mother, so my wife turns off
the patio light, and we stand there, she framed

in the doorway, me on the new grass, as luck,
with its stubby tail feathers, rustles and stirs

from its dry nest. Moments cleave to zero
like this. I call luck what others call sadness.

I take the temperature of the roast
then turn up the flames for the final sear.

I stare, mouth agape, at this high desert sky
considering our odds, a little rain spitting down

onto the edges of me, and I swear I feed
this sadness-that it plucks what it needs

right from my open mouth.

---

Why You Don't Miss the Ocean


In the Great Basin the night's a punch line,
a joke to our daylight selves
who thought the day's expanse
can be seen within us, but the night's curtain
descends, and we find our feet on the edge
of our life's small black box stage.
The community theater of our lives
where your friend in the booth of the all-night diner
talks through the casino's chatter
of false hope. His wife suddenly gone
with the day's maximum withdrawal.
In front of him the cheap steak and eggs
from an absurdist play no one finished.
The tourists behind him tell the waitress
about getting through all this middle-
of-nowhere desert to see the Pacific
at sunrise. Whole lotta empty to see here,
as if the night on the open road
looks fuller anywhere else. With the bill paid
you walk under the streetlights alone
into the desert's dark fullness and quiver
there for a time before taking the long
back roads home with the windows down-
a little wind over skin. You have seen
the ocean rise over a hill
after a long drive, you smelled it
in fact before you saw it, but tonight
it's the desert after a thin rain,
petrichor and creosote, and after you crest
the hill's crown, you see that wide sea
of man-made lights spread out
beneath you, this basin full to the eyes'
reach. You think of your friend's cool wife
who left without note or warning. Her face
now aglow in the palm reader's neon
because she's too poor to write her full story.
The beginning: pack a bag and leave,
but then what? So many dying from their poor
imaginations, action without vision.
So many writing a great first act, but how
many can find resolution? How to finish
a story with the antagonist written out?
The palm reader snubs out the burning
incense, the room thick with sandalwood,
It's supposed to be hard, darling.
Her skin green beneath her brass rings.
You're old enough to know
most holy women give dissatisfying answers,
but it's a bad idea to argue with them.
At home you don't slip into bed
to wake your wife. You brew strong coffee,
and as the day lifts its head from the hills,
you stare out into what sweep of desert
you can afford, the dark corners filling
with sunlight, then you dust the blue
bottles your wife placed along the windowsill
to make looking out into this world
more beautiful than it is.

---

Black Spring


When the robin returns
to the old eves of the newly painted
house and must build a new nest,
when you wake at night
with a dry throat, your body hot
in its loose skin, your wife sighing
through the fever sheets,
when that lone robin in your eves
calls out cheer up, cheer up,
and then tuck, tuck, tuck,
when you crack the blinds between you
and she calls warning,
but you hear bewilder, bewilder,
bewilder, when, behind her,
the dry lightning flashes in the distance
where at daybreak you walk the dog
along the wetlands, when you consider
dandelion leaves for salads,
and cattail roots for roasting,
when the news feed says they found
a new Black boy on the road side,
his exit wounds ringed with flies,
when the apologies begin, and the men
who sleep with their rifles climb
the Capitol steps, remember the calls
in the suddenly leaved trees, remember
even before us songs rustled
in the foliage unfurling without us,
remember to kneel in the scattered
eggshells of the season, remember to hold
the one who fell instead of flew.