EVERY PASTORAL IS AN ELEGY

Once I flipped, Whistle, over the front of a horse I was riding. He balked, pulled up, and above his dappled gray shoulder I sailed to the sawdust floor, belly up and tucked neatly beneath his raised razored hooves. Whistle, he stopped, miraculous in midair, in midstep, in microseconds, with great force of will and greater strain of muscle he refused something physics ordained, something for which he could bear no blame, like a god he interrupted cruel fate on my behalf. Later, from his back I spied in his turnout a perfect woven cup, a swallow’s nest of hair plucked from mane or tail. Our bodies, Whistle, are the material of essential matters we can’t foresee. If an alien in a galaxy sixty-five million light-years away is looking at us through a telescope right now it’s looking at dinosaurs, says an astronomer on the radio on the anniversary of a famous stargazer’s death. It’s simple, he says, the reason we find no evidence of life-forms like us is they too quickly destroy their planets. Which animals do you think keep us company, my friend asks, in past and future knowing? Maybe whales, I say, maybe elephants, but we’ve already talked too much about sadness today and birds can know only the present tense of their flying we agree and agree to leave it there. Pigeons scour the sidewalk, grackles scour the air. Relief after rainstorms. Some days even business as usual feels rare. If you watch to the end, the amateur videographer says in a post below the movie he took of himself saving a fawn stuck between the metal bars of a neighborhood fence, it almost looks like the mother is thanking us. I saw it happen, Whistle, what the billboards describe, I saw it begin, a noiseless slipping of the face beneath the surface, the silence of going under, and in this case by chance or by vigilance the awful invisibility was visible enough to be reversed by swift leap and wild grasp and then he was in my arms again, Whistle, like a newborn gasping and because he is mine, he is mine, he is mine, because on that day he did not die, because my fear from him I try to hide, because in the womb all sound is a kind of music, I started singing.