Darkness has feathered all night
downward into drifts. Vague bits of
dream. Discarded socks and shirt.
My feet take root and track it
outside, where what’s near
still recedes-woodpile, corral, the bay
mare’s heavy head nodding
between the rails-I’m not
ready to open my other eyes.
The hungry horses loom like ships,
restless and dark against the sky.
One pokes a blunt nose out of the night,
into my hand, and a dream I had before waking
takes shape again—a familiar child,
my brother’s new daughter left to my care
like the life-sized doll I was given
one birthday, a time I was really part horse.
She was too expensive to be taken from her box.
“When you’re older,” they promised. Nearly
forty now, I kept forgetting to carry crackers
and milk to the hidden room where this child
drifted in her crib. Little by little she stopped
inventing words. Her warm cheeks
cooled to wax. I never even thought
to pick her up, my arms weren’t real
as they weren’t in the days when I
flourished my silk scarf of a tail.
When I munched what I was fed. When I tossed
my head and slept hard. Daylight
abruptly has flooded this yard.
My neglect, my night track, does not
burn off, but the horses turn to me
anyway, the bringer of buckets and hay.
All night they held some shape
of me in their heads like a dream—
a snip of red, perhaps, a weightless thing
drifting in and out of their view.
Now they dip their heads in the circle
of my arms. Their jaws closing over
the charged and magical grains are engines
churning up steam that would startle
their vast bodies away, even now,
if I raised a hand to them suddenly.
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