Breaking Wild Horses<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
When romance walked in
\nthere were too many fatal secrets
\nhiding in sheltered places.
\nWe tried reining them in
\ncorralling their savage cries
\nfor attention \u2013 nothing seemed
\nto hold them at bay especially
\nas night broke the skyline
\nwith the first signs of morning
\nand our guards were down —
\nour fences rattling with weakness
\nthe whinny and stomping
\nof half remembered injuries
\nand families scabbed over.
\nWe fussed with the images
\ntrying to tidy them into civil
\nobedience \u2013 read how others
\nhad calmed their unruliness
\nas they nuzzled soft places
\nleft trails of rancid breath
\nflicked debris into the room (onto the table).
\nWhen romance moved on
\nthe old nags came closer to the house
\nchewed on the lace curtains.
\nWe couldn\u2019t just put them down
\nnot after they had been around
\nso long and carried so much baggage.
\nSo we groomed them
\ntrotted them out for prizes
\nboasted about their origins —
\nhow difficult it had been to finally
\nkeep them away from our comings
\nand goings \u2013 herded them into a far field
\nwhere their passing might go unnoticed
\nwhere even weeds bloomed in colors.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
By permission of the author.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a9<\/strong>\u00a0Copyright 2012.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n Colleen J. McElroy<\/a> lives in Seattle, Washington where she is a Professor Emeritus at the University of Washington, and served as Editor-in-chief of the Seattle Review<\/a><\/em> from 1995-2006. McElroy\u2019s collection of poems include most recently, Sleeping with the Moon <\/a><\/em>(2007), for which she received a 2008 PEN\/Oakland National Literary Award. Her latest collections of creative non-fiction include: A Long Way From St. Louie <\/a><\/em>(travel memoirs), and Over the Lip of the World: Among the Storytellers of Madagascar\u00a0<\/a><\/em>(finalist in the 2000 PEN USA Research-based Creative Nonfiction category). Winner of the Before Columbus American Book Award, she also has received two Fulbright Fellowships, two NEA Fellowships, a DuPont Fellowship, and a Rockefeller Fellowship. Her work has been translated into Russian, Italian, Arabic, Greek, French, German, Malay, and Serbo-Croatian. McElroy\u2019s ninth collection of poetry, Here I Throw Down My Heart, <\/em>will be published by the University of Pittsburgh Press in 2012.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Breaking Wild Horses When romance walked in there were too many fatal secrets hiding in sheltered places. We tried reining them in corralling their savage cries for attention \u2013 nothing seemed to hold them at bay especially as night … Continue reading