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Helen Wickes

Cattails in Sheep Canyon

Flick sharply on the shells,
and the cottony insides come flying,
so much packed in, eager to be freed
from the casings, a gossamer filament cloud mass
of soft-spun seed stuff. There’s an explosion,
a quiet one, and what’s released--
slow-sifting, too fine for gathering,
but alive, most definitely alive.

Other things impinge—that one who died
by his own hand, the other who overdosed—
but with cattails, rattling in hot wind,
it’s impossible to not be present,
opening one, another—temporary midwife
at the willow marsh, Coyote Creek, north fork,
alone, in March, eastern San Diego County--

charged with sending this dream fluff
pouring aloft, as if it had all day,
which it does, to rise above cottonwood
and smoke tree—anonymous, precise,
finite—to float toward Mexico
or cross the mountains to Indio.
Pray it finds water to set down roots.

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Helen Wickes lives in Oakland, California where she worked for many years as a psychotherapist. Her first book of poems, In Search ofLandscape, was published in 2007 by Sixteen Rivers Press. Her second collection, Dowser's Apprentice, was published in 2014 by Glass Lyre Press, as was her third book, Moon Over Zabriskie. In 2015, Sixteen Rivers press will publish World as You Left It.