Jim Nason is the author of two books of poetry, If Lips Were as Red and The Fist of Remembering, the latter an emotionally rich and honest account of the death of his partner from cancer. His novel, The Housekeeping Journals (Turnstone), is, to quote the program of the THIN AIR literary festival in which he appeared, “a warm and unsentimental portrait of a young man who provides home care to a cast of eccentrics in Toronto, including many dying” of the disease. Jim’s writing doesn’t flinch. And while his subject matter has often been about death and dying, his poetry is filled with light. In many ways his is the truly philosophical view that wastes no time mourning what might have been but is eager to embrace all that life might teach even in the deepest of sorrows.  Educated in Montreal (McGill), and Toronto (Ryerson and York), Jim Nason currently lives and works as a social worker in Toronto. His work, praised by writers such as John Ashbery in the United States and Laura Lush in Canada, has appeared in many literary journals across North America. 

Horse

You sink into the rose-print
sofa you bought at the Salvation Army,
wake slowly into morning.  Sunrise
is fire through a crack in the curtain,
circling your feet like an improbable halo
on the pine floor, the consoling warmth. 
Hung above the Medici vase, a black
and white photograph of a thoroughbred –
foaming flank of neck, strong legs weak
with rain and mud, zero percent body fat
you would say if the horse were naked
like a man – maybe the man who spends
an extra ten minutes in the steaming shower
across from you at the gym, wanting eyes
on his lonely chest, loving the world of sit-ups
and iron, hating himself for what he craves –
you see this in the way he looks at your own
fit body, how he soaps his rough thighs, bends
slowly to massage his knees, by the way he
hangs his beautiful head – hot water dripping
down around the scalded circle of his neck
like a flaming lei of pink roses.
The horse’s wet mane
and ballsy stance, framed
in slick hardwood – complex weave
of petal and thorn, you want to touch it,

smell the sexy mix of lime powder
and hay, hear the steady grind of oats
like gravel between his massive teeth,
heavy tail swatting flies from his tensed-up
rump, stomping in the stall, the water bucket
spilling, sunlight over piss-soaked straw.