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

I saw Stewart and Maud under a locust tree in Kensington market.
They had new bicycles. She leaned her sweaty, curly head on his bicep.
They had baguettes, flowers, asparagus and apples from the farm booths in their packs,
Buzet and Minervois from the liquor store, library books. They had life-loving things.
He says that for him this new life is instead of being an artist in Paris:
Backpacks, bicycles, the look of young lovers. The little possessions
That don't feel like a car or a house.  They are wearing bright white t shirts
And denim overalls. His children are confused. They have little money.
He joined the many who have refused to be punished for a mistake.

My friend Stewart lives with a university student.
You get to their Annex apartment up iron stairs bolted to the
Outside of  a building of old brick coloured like a driftwood campfire. The bed's iron.
She's been an adult for seven years. Iron, bricks, flowers, white iron bed,
Stewart has the skills to make it good, he's done this before, made the Muskoka
Chairs, the harvest tables, and sold them, repaired window frames and doors,
Advertised in supermarkets. He likes to breathe, to drink water, to cut wood and dress it,
To study, to read, to live well with a woman, to write in the evening, to make life like art.



                                       Paul Anthony Hutchinson
                                       www.paulanthonyhutchinson.com
                                       copyright Paul Anthony Hutchinson