(from Connecting the Dots, W.W. Norton, 1996)
I was the last of my line,
farm-raised, chesty, and bold.
Not one of your flawless show-world
forty-five pound Dalmations.
I ran with the horses, my darlings.
I loped at their heels, mile
for mile, swam rivers they forded
wet to the belly. I guarded
them grazing, haloed in flies.
Their smell became my smell.
Joyous I ate their manure.
Its undigested oats
still sweet, kept me fit.
I slept curled at the flank
of the fiercest broodmare.
We lay, a study in snores
ear flicks and farts in her stall
until she came to the brink,
the birth hour of her foal.
Then, she shunned me cruelly.
Spring and fall I erred over
and over. Skunks were my folly.
Then, I was nobody’s lover.
I rolled in dung and sand.
When my heart burst in the pond,
my body sank and then rose
like a birch log, a blaze
of white against spring green.
Now I lie under the grasses
they crop, my own swift horses
who start up and spook in the rain
without me, the warm summer rain.
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