CHORES: FILLING WATER BUCKETS

A rush of concentrated silver slaps

the bucket's emptiness. Wait till the brim

is nearly lapped, then lift and haul.

A full bucket

is a heavy thing. Just one unbalances

reminding symmetry eases the task.

Something flinches in the muscle. Buckets hang heavy

from each hand.

Winter mornings, the buckets are frozen solid.

In one, a black upended mouse

like a glacier-trapped mastadon.

Dumped, the ice domes form a row,

the buckets present emptiness, unquenchable darkness.

Nevertheless,

there is a peacefulness in the silent barn,

a late ray of sunlight creasing the dusty panes,

the stalls thickly bedded,

the water buckets brimming.

Hurricane Review

FOUNDER

When the horse dies

The brain is last to succumb.

The thrashing legs stilled.

The twitching lip.

The eye shines onward

Desperate to live. I wait

For it to film.

Needle in the vein

She goes down fast

Not like a wall crumbling

In tutus of dust

but like a stricken tree, sudden,

Awful, loud.

Now at last

Lying peaceful

Relaxed as she slept

When newborn

Her dam standing sentry

In the ancient habit of mares.

Founder, that’s a word

For horses and ships.

Coffin bones sinking and spars

Deep creaking agony

Of blood and ocean,

Common denominator of salt.

She licked salt blocks,

A bin of oats,

Bucket dark with water.

Once she raced like a schooner

Hooves and sails flying,

Steel in her mouth

A crowd shouting

Like a crew sighting land.

Her stall empty now,

Lonesome bay of straw

Gilded with dust.

In winter in the stone barn

She steamed

As if below decks.

In summer, manure smoked

As if alive, inoffensive waste

Of grass eaters, a holiness mad

Nebuchadnezzar hungered for.

Evolution made the horse

Pose upon landlocked toes

Like a ballet dancer. The hoof cannot expand

Blood flows and flows

Loosening anchors of laminae

Till like a ship broadsided in big seas

The horse rocks back

Sweating, its salted hide

Glazing eyes and grinding teeth

Like a keel sundering

Is lost now, lost

To the renderer and his hooks.

the new renaissance

DEAD HORSES

Now that they are dead or gone, the dream

is always of a field where running horses

flash past, hooves catching and echoing light,

the grass lush, milkweed or Queen Anne's lace

along the fencerows, then suddenly it's winter

snow is falling, shapes are haloed, the sky is bleak.

You might awaken, amazed the sound of horses

has passed, diminished just as a streak of daylight

pours through the curtains, fills bastions of lace

as your eyes fill with sorrow recalling a winter

where nothing ever thawed, each vista bleak,

you knew the vault of loss, the end of dreams

but would not acknowledge it, that blight of light

unraveling the seams of some grandmother's lace

concoction that formed a history, that overwintered

in every house you slept in, every bleak

ceiling that you woke to emptying dreams

into a landscape now bereft of horses.

Those horses, the dappled one like old lace

fading into the slushy nouns of winter

its whites and blacks and greys as bleak

as a deserted park, no childhood dreams

anchored by swingsets or gymnastic horses

on which you vaulted, slim and young and light

as any snowflake in any kind of winter,

the brilliant sled-filled one, even the bleak

fog frosted dawns, the ones that hid all dreams

until they burst from the icy mists like horses

racing to the barns in that first light

presaging hunger, muzzles coated with the lace

of their breathing, how they stormed the bleak

hollows where your final splintered dreams

corroded. You want them now, those horses

crashing the earth with sound as if light

had been surpassed by speed, as if the laces

that bind you to your bones gave way to winter's

blast, unreining every dream, freeing the horses

of your past, lightening that blanket of heavy lace

until you open your arms to winter and everything holy or bleak.

Georgia State University Review