(from Where I Live – New & Selected Poems 1990-2010, W.W. Norton, 2010)
After the year of come-and-go nosebleeds, after
daily washing mucousy blood from his forelegs and flanks
where he swiped himself clean in his impatient horsey way,
I saw the tumor sprout waxy and white
out of one nostril and dangle there, a rare fruit.
Truth rose in my mouth, a drench of gall and wormwood
and I sent for the vet and the backhoe driver
who came together like football coaches conferring.
The vet patted and praised him as she entered the stall
he was born in twenty-six years ago and staggered to his feet
with only a few false lunges in the predawn black and suckled
in small audible gulps from his warm mother. After
she got a line into his neck vein—he jittered a little the way
he’d always pulled back from the needle—
she started the sleep med and I stood with him feeding
him apple slices slowly making them last and when
his head drooped I led him out into the paddock and she shot
the syringe full of pentobard into his vein. He dropped
with a thud, a slain king, and by then the backhoe had torn
the earth open, the driver deep in the hole raising
icebox-size boulders and deftly arranging them in a row,
scooping red dirt as the late afternoon sun winked out
behind the treeline and after he finished the grave he went
downhill to fit the forks on the front of his machine and by then
I could hardly see as he hoisted the great swaying body aloft
and bore it across the road to the hole and in the cold dark I poured
a libation of apple juice for the earth to welcome his corpse—
some drops spilled on his chestnut flank and some dribbled
on his cheek and splashed onto his yellow teeth as he lay
deep on one side and my hand shook—I could hardly see—
rocking my grief back and forth over this kind death
the taste of apple wasting in his mouth.
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