Life With Horace

poetry & essays

Tag Archives: poem


by 3 Comments

Tipping Point

Not the moment
you came down the stairs
that first night and
I recognized the future

Not the sight of you
after a year apart
walking out of the airport fog
with love on your lips

Not the joy of raising children
our hands clasped hard
to speak love in silence
our shield against their fledging

Not the words
that turned time finite
and wanting to leave I stayed
knowing you would have

The love that whispered
its long goodbye, until
I found you one cold morning
and knew your heart
had left without me

It was this

________________________________
For Mike


by Leave a comment

Thinning time

Seven mornings in a row
the early eastern light
has snatched me away from sleep
filling my eyes with huge slashes
of sunrise, dark angry and pink
The first was on samhain, and
I could see the hand of Rage
reaching slyly toward the thinning 
scrim of time’s divide
its camp follower Fire hoping
to slip through alongside
compressed to nothing
like the soft bones of mice
The whispers of my genes begged
shout No and cry many tears
They will thicken the dawn
refusing entry to this surfeit of evil
All you love depends on them

Audio: Read by the author.



by Leave a comment

Floaters

High summer in an old house
occupied by an army of visiting bugs,
brings dreams of parachutes
for those I must evict
The one too many ones,
the wrong kind of spider
A waving scuttler scooped up,
all elbowed legs and angled hairy parts 
Run the mercy packet to the door,
release the tissue wrapped passenger
and watch it float down to sanctuary
on a bed of violet leaves 

 

________________________________________
A very old house. In the winter we have critters. Summer brings the bugs The right kind of spiders? Thin bodied long-legged spiders that look like Charlotte. 


by Leave a comment

The Morgan

It could have been
a silver mercury portrait,
but a horse appeared
displacing stiff poses,
mane flying, neck muscles
bunched in effort,
galloping through
a glimpse of the past.

 

 


Audio: Read by the author.


____________________________
A marvelous photo of a Morgan mare by the photographer Deborah Glessner brought up the last two lines of the poem. 


by Leave a comment

The right note

Tomorrow might have been fifty-two
not just thirteen since thirty-nine
Aligned with family and gratitude
the day always reflected joy,
the heat of our love folded into stuffing
The missing of him has gotten harder
but it seems he knows. I came upon
the sound of his small gasp
that wrapped me up each time
in beauty gauze, when finally ready
I presented myself to his gaze
before our evenings out
Deliciousness itself, just knowing
that he would when I did
that he always meant it.
And I can smile now, the memory
a pitch perfect gift

.

.


Audio: Read by the author.