Your Idea of Embracing Horror

By A. F. Moritz b. 1947

Your idea of embracing horror

was overwhelmed by the horror:

in the mild

milkiness of the afternoon, on the bluff

that commands a vision of bank towers

knifing up far higher than the rising, empty

shell of the moon ... on the height where you stand

and still can't understand your life

as anything but slow dying, your time seeps out

as into a warm bath, the way the exemplary career

of Petronius the Just—pornographer and satirist-

once leaked away.

Albert Frank Moritz, "Your Idea of Embracing Horror" from Houseboat on the Styx. Copyright © 1998 by Albert Frank Moritz. Reprinted by permission of Ekstasis Editions.

Source: Houseboat on the Styx (Ekstasis Editions, 1998)

Biography

A.F. Moritz (Albert F. Moritz) is the author of more than 15 books of poetry; he has received the Award in Literature from the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters, the Relit Award (for Night Street Repairs, named the best book of poetry published in Canada in 2005), an Ingram Merrill Fellowship, and a fellowship from the Guggenheim Foundation. A Canadian citizen, Moritz was born in Ohio and moved to Canada in . . .

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