Who would have carried it this far,
up the crest between watersheds, 
then quit before the downhill?

It doesn’t seem old enough
to have been stranded
when this land was covered
by shallow waters

that buckled and rose,
dividing the water in two. 
Every year it sheds a board.
The paint muted,

drawn into surrounding foliage.
If the trees know the story, they aren’t saying.
A trunk has pushed through the hull
pinning the bow to the hillside.

So it can hardly be the lifeboat
we will step into
when the waters fill the valley again
that will allow us to float away.

Alison Hicks is the author of poetry collections You Who Took the Boat Out and Kiss, a chapbook Falling Dreams, and a novella, Love: A Story of Images. Her work has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize and has appeared in Eclipse, Gargoyle, Green Hills Literary Lantern, and is forthcoming in Poet Lore. She is founder of Greater Philadelphia Wordshop Studio, which offers community-based writing workshops.