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

St. Catharines light in the afternoon: lead oxide, pink white, dry mud shadows.
They lay on her living room carpet and Anthony gloated over Milly
Her cotton nightgown, her long back, and round shoulders: proof at last.
"So this is gloating. It is better to gloat than to doubt. It took me a long time."

Her clean faded quilt brought from the balcony rail: it
Smells of clean laundry and cold air and the thrill of their power.
He’s proud to be the lover of a heroine,
And happy that he can see her this way.”

Picnic kisses tasting of smoked oysters and beer.
There were never friendly kisses of love before?
"Milly, I love hearing how you defied the adults."

He told Hansel and Gretel to her child, who had strep throat,
And told it again, knowing it would work,

Seeing the bookshelves, seeing her notebooks,
Knowing that he would have his life after all:

                      The mispronounced words of a solitary reader,
                       The red skirt on the chair, the gold necklace of coins.


                   Paul Anthony Hutchinson
www.paulanthonyhutchinson.com
Copyright Paul Anthony Hutchinson