Amy Kitchener's Angels Without Wings Foundation
Presents the 2008 Utah Senior Poet Laureate

M. M. Fisher

M. M. FISHER, 64, Salt Lake City, Utah, is a well-known award-winning poet whose creativity is not limited to the bardic art. As a gifted seamstress, her artistic talent with needle and thread extends through several genres of sewing, a field from which she is not retired. Her sign is Virgo.

This Is Not A Love Song


I'm out of practice writing music;
besides, you told me once your ear was tin.
I remember that--and everything:
blacksmith shoulders spreading your shirt,
big tanned hands, humor curling like cat toes
behind hazel eyes--that whole King Tom
aura you never seemed to trade on--just there,
crackling like static charge across your skin,
and mine.

I still see you leaning on a corral fence--
the good, no nonsense boots, the long legs
bracing your back against a pole--
discussing mountain deer trails, discovering
we rode the same ones. I remember
the dappled gray you always rode up there
alone. My appaloosa
would have paced that big gray well.

But this is not a love song;
you were ten years into marriage
with children before I ever saw you.

You said--once--with all the questions
in those green-flecked eyes,
your lady had never really liked to ride,
and I've always liked men's company
just as friends--oh; I can rationalize as well
as anyone.....at times. But you're the one
I couldn't dare--could keep for all these years,
only for the daydreams.

So this is not your love song, smith,
since we never made the music--
just its lyrics.....for me,
remembering.

M. M. Fisher
Salt Lake City, Utah