Waking Up by Pat Hanahoe-Dosch

Camping in a tent
by a lake where the trees
                look like combs
                                used to
untangle the black hair of their shadows and
                whatever filaments live deep in the dark
                                shards of rocks
beneath this tent floor
                 determined to carve my legs
                                into totems to signify the history of whatever
journey I’m taking here
despite myself.

The canoe rocks and drifts.
                Brackish cedar water
                                stains my toes and
I am rowing before the gate of the lake,
                the dam,  and I am
                                the fish churning upriver
but there are no spawn, no eggs, no watery stairs,
                only the river and the lake
                                and the trees, combing the air,
draped in spider webs, pine branches,
                the morning’s light weaving
                                through the green and black
where it can, as a cold mist blooms outward
                in patches along the coastline
                                like a predatory, weightless vine.

Pat Hanahoe-Dosch has an MFA from the University of Arizona in Tucson, Arizona, and is currently an Associate Professor of English at Harrisburg Area Community College, Lancaster campus.  Pat's poems have been published  in The Atticus Review, War, Art and Literature, Confrontation, The Red River Review, San Pedro River Review, Marco Polo Arts Magazine, Red Ochre Lit, Nervous Breakdown, Quantum Poetry Magazine, The Paterson Literary Review, Abalone Moon, Apt, Switched-on Gutenberg, and Paterson: The Poets’ City (an anthology edited by Maria Mazziotti Gillan), among others. Pat's book, Fleeing Back, (a collection of poems), was published by FutureCycle Press at the end of 2012.