My Son’s Raft
Afloat it waddles through shallows steadies enough to turn
and belly its way into the lake on knees you struggle for balance
pole forward I couldn’t see how it would hold as I watched you
nail crosspieces a platform begging scrap wood
from neighbors hauling fallen limbs
you worked through the weekend
pinched fingers hammered thumb I found cords
for lashing boards brought you milk jugs for buoyancy we learned
trial and error about placement
I insisted on a life jacket
handed you the sun-bleached clothesline pole and here you are
on the water in an afternoon’s haze of insects circling deadheads
zigzagging toward logs of turtles we all sail year by year
in jury-rigged vessels flimsy leaf on the wind
dinghy between ocean swells
scraps and flotsam lashed to bone buoyed by ardor or need
a friend judged her craft unsound she quit us others cling
to boggy timbers—last vines unraveling chin above water’s chop grinning
enthralled with every water-logged hour your raft will float
back or I will paddle out to you—
throw a line.
Michigan poet Lynn Pattison is author of Matryoshka Houses (Kelsay Press, 2020) in addition to three other poetry collections: tesla’s daughter (March St. Press), Walking Back the Cat (Bright Hill Press), and Light That Sounds Like Breaking (Mayapple Press). Her work has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize and for inclusion in Best Micro-fiction. Pattison’s poems have appeared in Ruminate, Tinderbox, New Flash Fiction Review, The Notre Dame Review, Smartish Pace, and other journals, as well as in a number of anthologies.
