The Gift
It was not what it could be, but what it was I wanted—
That horse like a pendulum stilled
Between the faint blue ridge
Of the Sangre de Cristo mountains, Blood of Christ,
And the dust of the Arkansas Valley,
Sage-run, plucked by a north wind
Toward slow spring.
A philospher once said it:
In the true meadow of the soul,
Only asphodels grow, and so only sadness,
Those fields for the dead.
How could I explain it, my daughters, mine,
Standing there, and already my darkest waters,
Or nothing so definite,
Steering me?
Grief of love then —
That head tied to a rusted trailer,
The horse standing there hump-withered,
Head-bowed, all clavichord
And brae of bone, wing of spindly rib, love,
What I could hardly dare finger
This many years past, and, suddenly,
This haggard drum of skin
Be-whiskered, shit-carved.
Of course they did not want it—
My girls all hot-blooded for totem
And winged deity, courier of the gods, dark effigy
Blown freehand some thousand years past on cave walls—
All this sex, of course, yet unnamed by them still,
Even as they dream (as I know they dream):
The slender stems of their bodies
The wind strums
Balancing over the willful, beating heart.