Mother’s Day Flight Plan
For Ben
The Cessna purrs one thousand feet above
a field of yellow tulips, the river
like a long green stem in the Skagit Valley.
I remember teaching the pilot to drive,
remember placing his newborn body
on a yellow blanket beneath the skylight
to soak in the sun at the doctor’s orders,
him gazing up at the sky where he’d one day
fly over the place where his journey began.
Self-Guided Safari
The little white rental car
is dwarfed by big grey elephants
crossing the road with babies in tow.
The leader eyes us and bellows,
her ears flapping. The trumpeting
warns us to back off
and we do, giving the lumbering
tons of wrinkled glory plenty of room
to parade away, when the elephant
walks, the earth listens, but who can
know what they are thinking. Leaving
the reserve, we see one more
by the side of the road and we stop
for one more photo, but she’s
not having it and charges
toward us as if ready to use the
forty thousand muscles in her trunk
to overturn our car and show us who
is boss here. Hubbie tries to start the car
and it stalls, while I look the other way
and pray. She’s still charging when
the engine kicks in and we let her win,
knowing it’s a bluff only when you drive away,
when you live to write the poem.
Incubation
The alligator sleeps not far from us.
We could not outrun her,
warns my daughter. Never Forget
says my son’s t-rex t-shirt.
We are on spring break in the Everglades
and past the point of resurrection,
the candling of Earth’s egg
held up to flickering light.
We look for the embryo of hope,
after the dark tomb of a northern winter.
The big lizard lying near us does too.
She celebrates spring
by scooping her unhatched eggs
into the cave of her mouth
and performs her own ultrasound.
She’s feeling for movement
like the farmer holds hen eggs before the candle.
If he sees nothing, he’ll toss them,
as the gator will swallow any empty eggs,
or as we look inside ourselves to see
which dreams are alive and which have died.
Marianne Mersereau is the author of In the Grip of Grace (Finishing Line Press, 2024) and the chapbook, Timbrel, also from Finishing Line Press, 2013. Her poems are widely published and appear in numerous anthologies.
For Ben
The Cessna purrs one thousand feet above
a field of yellow tulips, the river
like a long green stem in the Skagit Valley.
I remember teaching the pilot to drive,
remember placing his newborn body
on a yellow blanket beneath the skylight
to soak in the sun at the doctor’s orders,
him gazing up at the sky where he’d one day
fly over the place where his journey began.
Self-Guided Safari
The little white rental car
is dwarfed by big grey elephants
crossing the road with babies in tow.
The leader eyes us and bellows,
her ears flapping. The trumpeting
warns us to back off
and we do, giving the lumbering
tons of wrinkled glory plenty of room
to parade away, when the elephant
walks, the earth listens, but who can
know what they are thinking. Leaving
the reserve, we see one more
by the side of the road and we stop
for one more photo, but she’s
not having it and charges
toward us as if ready to use the
forty thousand muscles in her trunk
to overturn our car and show us who
is boss here. Hubbie tries to start the car
and it stalls, while I look the other way
and pray. She’s still charging when
the engine kicks in and we let her win,
knowing it’s a bluff only when you drive away,
when you live to write the poem.
Incubation
The alligator sleeps not far from us.
We could not outrun her,
warns my daughter. Never Forget
says my son’s t-rex t-shirt.
We are on spring break in the Everglades
and past the point of resurrection,
the candling of Earth’s egg
held up to flickering light.
We look for the embryo of hope,
after the dark tomb of a northern winter.
The big lizard lying near us does too.
She celebrates spring
by scooping her unhatched eggs
into the cave of her mouth
and performs her own ultrasound.
She’s feeling for movement
like the farmer holds hen eggs before the candle.
If he sees nothing, he’ll toss them,
as the gator will swallow any empty eggs,
or as we look inside ourselves to see
which dreams are alive and which have died.
Marianne Mersereau is the author of In the Grip of Grace (Finishing Line Press, 2024) and the chapbook, Timbrel, also from Finishing Line Press, 2013. Her poems are widely published and appear in numerous anthologies.
