Three Poems by Muriel Nelson (Poetry ’96)

If it didn’t matter, I would live

in the moment the horseless carriage freed the horse,

in air where you can smell the carrots when you pull them,

in that roar and flash of beaten heat
when every drop like iron is Thor’s hammer
bouncing back from a river’s sheen,

or in the nonce when a pianist stumbled, his fingers tangled,
but improvised as if his difficult passage were meant
to go partway up, pause for our gasps,
and then in perfect time, summit.