Ecstasis

When a friend of mine ran out of closets, she built a room for her clothes
like the stores where she shops: upper and lower hangers packed on every wall.
It isn’t extravagance, it’s impulse. She adopts dogs the same way, flooded
with compassion, keeps seven in her house she’s saved.

I am not overcome to give love, which sometimes feels a roomful doing
no one any good. Only randomly leaking out. A double tip for a harried waitress,
an overly-long thank you, that embarrasses my wife, to a janitor whose care
wages could never buy.

It’s the ecstasy of love I fear; where it could take me, how it might leave me. God
piling in past my capacity to hold, pushing me out of myself, as if my body
were a house that could burst with dogs and clothes.

Joseph Hardy lives in Nashville, Tennessee, His work has been published in: Appalachian Review, Cold Mountain Review, Inlandia, Poet Lore, and Poetry City among others. He is the author of a book of poetry, “The Only Light Coming In”.