POEM #17- BYGONES

I'm writing poetry this month with Mary Lee Hahn, Kevin Hodgson, Steve Peterson, and Carol Varsalona. We're two days past the halfway point, and so far I've written every day…

"Meeting"
So Ma snapped this picture
out in the middle of the corral
I think it was my junior year
in high school,
but I might have been a senior

it's a nice picture
and I hung it over my desk
when I moved away
and missed all that
furry love

but this photo
out in public
with everyone watching
and shouting at us
to smile and say cheese
that's not how it really was

mostly, we three,
were a team
and we lived quiet

whenever life got too big
when Alice Brown dumped me
eleven days after she said
she couldn't wait to get married
when I didn't make first team basketball
(my brother always did)
when Pa told me that
being an artist wasn't a career
and I better figure out
a way to make a living

I'd go out and sit on the fence
or on a hay bale in the barn
just kinda quiet like
and pretty soon
that old brown mare
would come up and nuzzle my hand
she was always checking for an apple or a carrot
or her favorite, a lump of sugar that
I stole from ma's blue china bowl

and the dog-- I always fed her,
and so she decided
when she was just a pup
that she was mine--
she'd somehow squeeze her way
between the horse and me
leaning against my legs
and hoping for a good scratch
under the old leather collar
with the broken buckle
that we never quite
got around to replacing

and the three of us
would hold a private meeting

we'd confer
until we solved
the world's problems

and life was good again

(C) Carol Wilcox