He finds that Habit holds too close and holds too tight. “Let go,”
He thinks, “I have my breath to catch. What started as a waltz
Is now this marathon. I fold within your tireless arms.
You were attractive at first. We seemed to fit.
Now I cannot recall
Your absence.
Whatever tawdry witch has cast her spell, I implore
To raise her wand.
I am too weak now Panic nears.
Am I never to guide and be guided by Joy, that radiant other
Whose classic head, unknowing of my plight,
Rounds into mocking view too often to be chance?”
Now he believes that from the start
He should have partnered
The harder one to ask.
About Jonathan Bracker
Jonathan Bracker's poems have appeared in The New Yorker, Poetry Northwest, Writer's Digest, and other periodicals; in several small press anthologies, and in six small press collections. Bracker is the editor of Bright Cages: The Selected Poems Of Christopher Morley (University of Pennsylvania Press: 1965), co-author with Mark Wallach of Christopher Morley (Twayne Press: 1976), and editor of A Little Patch Of Shepherd's-Thyme: Prose Passages Of Thomas Hardy Arranged As Verse (Moving Finger Press: 2013). A new collection of his work, Concerning Poetry: Poems About Poetry, is due from the Upper Hand Press of Bexley, Ohio, in Spring 2018.
