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