Horse

Bending to the earth, the silhouette of a horse

is a hillside, dense as almond wood.

From wither to tail, a bristling escarpment

drops to a levelling range and a broadening flatland,

its bare-blank spine, cradles the sprawling horizon

and valley depths. At first light, with the long

slope of its neck plunging groundward,

it stands steaming among the outcrops,

thawing with the quartz stone earth.

As the sun lifts, the mist comes quietly,

idly avalanching the treetops before draining

into the white void of the morning air.

On ironed hooves and crooked stumps, the horse

stays grazing, dipping and disappearing into itself.

Frostmelt drips from the red-brown furrows of its hide

down into the mud and clover.

               Blowing in from the tops,

the air shifts and stirs; long flanks of light

strip shadows from the clay. Dozy, not asleep,

the horse sinks further into a wilderness within its skull.

How easily it drifts, stooped under such tonnage,

poised and unmoved in its thickly furred slack frame.

Motionless, under half-closed lids it has slipped,

as if flown from the bars of an unlocked gate,

bolted to the blind spot between its eyes,

dawning headlong deep in the dew.

Todd Turner