"Fall Line" by Linda Colsh

Under the thick woolen northwestern sky
a woman is hanging her sheets. Maybe shaking them
into air, setting them straight on a rope with wooden pins.

Maybe she looks up, sees the huge slow wheel of snow
geese in winter migration. "This is not a castle to be built,
but one day to be lived", she speaks aloud to no one as her

fingers smooth wet cotton and the flocks flying from
Alaska to Mexico spill across cattle scattered fields
where crows, tall egrets and now white on white, the geese

all flutter like run away kerchiefs in a breeze. Folding softly
over the contours of the fallow land they move as one great
restless body- a woman lying on her lover, undulating

with her need, rising then settling again and again
on his flesh until they lift. And in flight they steal
the shapes of clouds and the thoughts of the woman

on the backyard hill whose black hair falls against
her neck in tendrils as she wields her laundry hard into
the shape of a bird, which for that one moment seems free.

Bio: Holaday Mason is the author of two chapbooks "Light Spilling From its Own Cup" (Inevitable Press,1999) and "Interlude" (Far Star Fire Press, 2001). Nominated for a Pushcart in 2000, her work has appeared in many journals such as Poetry International, The Nebraska Review, The Comstock Review, Spoon River Review, Cider Press Review, The Yalobusha Review, The Portland Review, and Art Life. She is currently completing her second book of poems "The Problem of Beauty."

Contact Holaday Mason at holaday@cyberverse.com