| Two Poems by Patricia Gray | ||
Dell in Summer Remembering the horse's damp nose in my palm nibbling shelled corn or a sugar cube—or even a tuft of grass I picked to lure her close— magnificent Dell with the sleek rusty coat and the stripe on her face from forehead to over her nose..... She nuzzles my hand as I slip the bit into her mouth, bridle over her ears, then climb onto her back. We ride into tree-green wildness, gallop over yarrow and clover, where wild horses ran long ago, lifting their shins in the air, fighting each other for position, their pink mouths and nostrils open, their knotted manes flowing. Dell's muzzle goes down swiftly to the creek, drawing in draughts of clear, cold liquid, its scent. When I pull her up, she snorts the drops free, jerking her head to test me, but my fingers knit into her mane. As I loosen the reins, a runway of green rushes under us. Our spirits lift to the wind. Late in the Day We continue our grievances at dinner: the short one is teased, the thin one maligned, rivalries rekindled, grown children disowned. The holiday meal nearly ended, we abandon turkey bone and gristle, cranberry sauce sweet and bitter as blood, and surrender one by one to the children urging us out to play aerobie. My son and ex-husband have gone to new families. Only my brother, sister and children, and the sturdy man I now love stand with me in the lengthening light, to toss the plastic ring that rises as if to go over the sun, though it glides up in a slow loop only— and down, passing from hand to hand. The brother who has tormented me tosses carefully now, so that I will catch and throw to the child between us, or to my sister who, with her great bulk, hoards all that she has lost, yet lumbers to catch the ring as the circle widens like a ripple or shrinks to hold something we've never known— how to be together without rancor— as if life could be just this easy, and the family we are given by birth (or by choice) is the right one for us—the only one— and this life, this one life, is enough. PATRICIA GRAY lives and works on Capitol Hill and coordinates the Poetry at Noon program at the Library of Congress. Her chapbook, Rich With Desire, was published in early 1998 by E Street Press, and her poems have appeared in Poetry East, The MacGuffin, Shenandoah, and in other magazines and anthologies. |