Wednesday, November 15, 8:00 PM

"Like the well-schooled horse changing leads in mid-air, Henry Taylor makes us perceive the grace of that moment of suspension. For him it is a moment of acute recognition of our mortality, our connection to the past, our need to love. His voice is meditative, his control of form absolute."

—Maxine Kumin

Winner of the 1986 Pulitzer Prize in Poetry for The Flying Change, Henry Taylor is the author of five volumes of poetry, including The Horse Show at Midnight, An Afternoon of Pocket Billiards, and Understanding Fiction: Poems, 1986-1996. His most recent work is Brief Candles, a collection of 101 Clerihews that reflect on prominent literary and historical figures from Tennyson to Jacques Derrida to each member of the United States Supreme Court. Along with the Pulitzer Prize, Taylor has received the Wittner Bynner Prize for Poetry from the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters, a research grant from the NEH, two fellowships from the NEA, and has been elected to membership in the Fellowship of Southern Writers. He currently teaches and directs the MFA Program in Creative Writing at American University in Washington, DC.

Two Husbands

1

She says she’ll leave him if he screws around;

why not attempt it, if that’s all it takes?

He fears forgiveness; through her, he has found

uprightness in his dreams of dodged mistakes.

2

The youthful urge to kill has left him dry,

that filled their first years with ecstatic woe;

he is content to wait, and watch things die:

as life goes on, he learns to let it go.

—from The Flying Change