Nancy Devine

"Scenes from Childhood" is a suite of 13 pieces written by Robert Schumann in 1838. When I grew up, I took piano lessons and played selections from this collection. The music is among the work I go back to frequently not only to play but to lead me to reminisce about my childhood and its connections, both subtle and overt, to those pieces of music.  Each of the poems in this work is named the same as a piece in the collection; the poem titles here follow the sequence of those pieces.--Nancy Devine

Blind Man’s Bluff

This horse I ride at family camp is the deep red of an Irish setter, his body a behemoth to my fear, my legs. Suddenly he’s no longer being, just muscle dense as concrete but pliable enough to make you think you could be the rider. He’s ripping like he wants to friend the wind, like he’s a creature again trying to escape the velocity of his genes, send me off the butte ahead into Lake Sakakawea below, the water of a town dammed.  I pull, panic. We don’t go over the edge; I don’t remember how exactly this goes.