After the horse went down
the heat came up,
and later that week
the smell of its fester yawed,
an open mouth of had-been air
our local world was licked
inside of, and I,
the boy who’d volunteered at twilight—
shunts of chawed cardboard
wadded up my nostrils
and a dampened bandana
over my nose and mouth—
I strode then
into the ever-purpler sink
of rankness and smut,
a sloshful five-gallon bucket of kerosene
in my right hand,
a smoking railroad fusee
in my left,
and it came over me like water then,
into my head-gaps and gum
rinds, into the tear ducts
and taste buds and even
into the last dark tendrils
of my howling, agonised hair
that through the windless half-light
hoped to fly from my very head,
and would have, I have no doubt, had not
the first splash of kerosene
launched a seething skin
of flies into the air
and onto me, the cloud of them
so dense and dark my mother in the distance
saw smoke and believed as she had feared
I would, that I had set my own
fool and staggering self aflame,
and therefore she fainted and did not see
how the fire kicked
the other billion flies airborne
exactly in the shape
of the horse itself,
which rose for a brief quivering
instant under me, and which for a pulse thump
at least, I rode—in a livery of iridescence,
in a mail of exoskeletal facets,
wielding a lance of swimming lace—
just as night rode the light, and the bones,
and a sweet, cleansing smoke to ground.