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