View From the Fence, On Which I Sit and Dangle My Legs

The horses are beating inside the field.

The horses are the night’s blood

congealed. Moon-whipped horses,

frost-spun, clicking their teeth

against dead grass. Horses

with stomachs full of dust, how the flies

pick at their eyes, in love.

The horse lives in my eye without drowning.

Its ribs clatter like the train.

Horse with a broken leg,

with a bullet in your head, I saw you

in the stream last night.

You were eating the brain-star

fallen to the field. You

smelled of rifle-fire and cold.

I would make a violin, sing back,

but all the wood here burned.

The earth is burning, a funeral

after which nothing is buried.

Horse with the lash marks,

your one-eye filled with mine,

you search my palm for grain.

You shake the dust from your muscles

and it smells of spring.

The dust looks like a ghost

shattering. Then rain fallen across skin,

trickling from thigh to ankle,

down the back of the knee—

beauty, tickling the body

to laughter: I will follow you down.