|
|
| Because I know tomorrow |
| his faithful gelding heart will be broken |
| when the spotted mare is trailered and driven away, |
| I come today to take him for a gallop on Diaz Ridge. |
| |
| Returning, he will whinny for his love. |
| Ancient, spavined, |
| her white parts red with hill-dust, |
| her red parts whitened with the same, she never answers. |
| |
| But today, when I turn him loose at the hill-gate |
| with the taste of chewed oat on his tongue |
| and the saddle-sweat rinsed off with water, |
| I know he will canter, however tired, |
| whinnying wildly up the ridge's near side, |
| and I know he will find her. |
| |
| He will be filled with the sureness of horses |
| whose bellies are grain-filled, |
| whose long-ribbed loneliness |
| can be scratched into no-longer-lonely. |
| |
| His long teeth on her withers, |
| her rough-coated spots will grow damp and wild. |
| Her long teeth on his withers, |
| his oiled-teakwood smoothness will grow damp and wild. |
| Their shadows' chiasmus will fleck and fill with flies, |
| the eight marks of their fortune stamp and then cancel the earth. |
| From ear-flick to tail-switch, they stand in one body. |
| No luck is as boundless as theirs. |
|
|
