Poetry by Timothy Geiger

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Binomial
            — a mathematical expression consisting of two terms connected 
            by a plus sign or a minus sign.
                                                               (Merriam-Webster)


Two horses grazed apart, 
one on each side of the corral 
split in half by a stockade fence 
stretching up and disappearing
over the grassy hill. The chestnut
watched the dappled gray, more
gaze than graze in her stance.
It may have gone on forever,
not the fence receding, but
the longing the horses felt
to be near one another, 
the same ache I still feel 
when I miss my mother’s voice. 
It’s easy to forget it’s not my job
to put the world back together.
Six hours and an axe, I could
probably take that fence down,
split and cast the cedar rails,
just fence post stumps
sticking up from the ground. 
Two weeks before she died
I asked her why she wanted
her ashes in an urn behind 
a granite slab. She told me
she’d always lived too far away 
to be scattered in some ocean
so it all became about remaining 
whole. There is no ocean, no lake,
or even a river for miles around 
here—just a pasture beyond
the corral, beyond the fence line 
stretching to the sunrise, 
mirages in the blurred distance 
of perspective, into which 
the separate horses now run.

​



Timothy Geiger is the author of the poetry collections Weatherbox, (winner of the 2019 Vern Rutsala Poetry Prize from Cloudbank Books), The Curse of Pheromones, and Blue Light Factory. His newest collection, In a Field of Hallowed Be, is forthcoming in September 2024 from Terrapin Books. He lives on a small farmstead in Northwest Ohio and teaches Creative Writing, Poetry, and Book Arts at the University of Toledo.