Gifted



It felt more important to have a darling and children
Than to live a story.
We have vignettes
of love and work and study.

I tried hard to be good.
I had to make up for the gifts that god, the fairies, or genetics did not give me.

What is certainly true except vignettes?
You my love have been compassionate and brave.

I think the names
Of love, courage, compassion, diligence, honour,
and some others as if they were gods.



Paul Anthony Hutchinson
wow.paulanthonyhutchinson.com

Copyright Paul Anthony Hutchinson

THE PONIES IN SNOW PARK


Under flapping green and white awnings
On a wide Toronto street I feel your gloved hand on my tweed coat.
You are cold. We run. It is one o'clock, winter afternoon.
Waiting for the car to warm up we touch mouths and tongues.

This is what I always wanted. We are young. We are wearing
Our favourite clothes. The green and orange plastic pennons
Of the service station slap in the wind.  The ponies stand
Far away, at the edge of the woods in Snow Park.

Some bear their share of the burden of the meaning of life
More easily than others. I know that
When you are alone you must build walls
And figure ways to smash them down.

I know how some mouths opened over you
Like Borgia rings over a wineglass, and how, therefore, it was
Hard for you to abandon the problem many of us loved:
How can I avoid doing harm; how can I avoid harm?

Out of the changes in human emotion,
Out of the changes in faces and lives,
You took the power to do with me what once
You might have done for sadness, or for love, alone.

Our shape refuses depression.
I point at birds. There is music on the radio.
I grin and hug. A few silver minutes now
Of ponies, music, dull orange breast feathers.

                              Paul Anthony Hutchinson

This poem was published in WAVES
pahutchinson@icloud.com
Copyright  Paul Anthony Hutchinson
  www.paulanthonyhutchinson.com

This happened to Malcolm

My sister Hadley hosed green stuff off the ***.

When she squirted my ear I ****** the neck rope. Her skin was hurt so

The horse folded back her lips and bit my thigh with brown yellow teeth.

I was thirteen. I locked myself in the bathroom.

I felt ***** as a smug prayer for running. Mom said,

“Come back out. Don’t get left behind.” My dad had run away.

I splashed my face cold and put on my jeans. I hustled out. Not for my mother.

Scottie was a Brock University girl from PEI who cut and doctored hooves and skin

And shod horses and filed their teeth. You could smell teeth filings and Stockholm tar

And when I went back to the head she held my face

A long time in her hands and said I knew you were a straight arrow.

That might have scared my mom.

That was the first time I ever did it with anyone.




Paul Anthony Hutchinson

LAUREL AND THE MARE

It was spring and Southern Ontario air tasted of trees.
A pregnant mare escaped to the woods from her prison on the estrogen farm.
She had long, curled hooves and cracked skin.
She came to Laurel and her two children at the edge of Beamsville.
Laurel had no work, a jumble of painted canvasses in the porch, her father's
Hired man's stucco cottage. Laurel, Hadley, Malcolm wore ski jackets and jeans.
The horse loved to exercise at night in the yard.
They combed her and gave her oats. They couldn't afford a vet so they

Called a farrier horse dentist and she fixed the skin and hooves and filed the teeth.
They hung a trouble light on a nail and talked to the horse at night.
The farm smelled of animal again: you know the power of grass breath.
They read library horse books and what's left of the family
Sang with the radio in the barn. Those might have been holy days,
They were feast days, and the children were pulled away from
American television by the strong and willing horse.

Torn French bread and good cheap Beamsville Magnotta wine on the picnic table,
Wine for the children, too, and they all read in their beds after dark.
Laurel went to bed thinking: "It's La Vie Boheme for us."
She gloated at the return of ******
Feeling and the possibility of love and laughed her
Coarse, sweet, hee-haw laugh.

        Paul Anthony Hutchinson    
This poem was published in Canadian Poetry

Like half written symphonies I wait for you.

I wait for you
like an empty house
so you come and build yourself
in me.

I wait for you
like the flowers wait for spring
to bring them
back to life.

I wait for you
like the rush of blood
my head needs
to feel alive.

I wait for you
like the warm earth
needs the kiss
of soft rain.

I wait for you
like the souls
that walk this earth
waiting for release.

I wait for you
like the heart
that needs a score
to play.

Like purity for
true love,
I wait for you.

I wait for you.