Where in unconsciousness do horses lodge?
The grief and splendour, the panic’s eye
hovering in the doorway of waking?
The modest sadness of the horse,
banished from roads and fields, nudges in
unasked. The people lined below
the improbable scaffold, gawking
at the grace of a moment’s fall, this
lithe diver stretching above an answer
to a dream suppressed, a longing
for nights of hooves and sky. Tenderness heaves
upwards from tight throats, the crowd
awestruck by this whitest creature’s flight.
Then the sigh exhaled, the ripples in its wake.