- You Asked About Longing
“There you are,” the sun seems to say,threading, briefly, a three-day cloud.
Wind through a field, across your face —“I was getting used to the absence” — and hair,
just-red, tucked from your shoulder to behindyour ear, leaving less hidden a face that, when
you woke this morning, turned at once intoand through the pale light, narrow
between curtains. Sometimes we want a thing— leaves toss like water; eyes, wet in wind, toy
with closing, but resist — more than we can admitwe want a thing. Remind me to show you where,
two springs ago, the chestnut mare gnawedthrough the top rung of her paddock fence,
the space she left herself to leap through — notfor the freedom of it, or anything like escape,
though her leaping was for sure a liberty. No,we found her standing there sometime later,
touching noses with the foal she left behind. [End Page 116]
D. S. Waldman is a Sarah B. Marsh-Rebelo scholar at San Diego State University. www.dswaldman.com