Letter from Sweetwater
1.
One of the horses is sick, the gray one.
Yesterday morning I went to check on her.
Found the fever made her panic, try to kick
out her stall. Gashed her face pretty bad,
down to the tooth. I have been sitting up
with her, trying to keep her calm until the
fever breaks.
2.
How alien fever is from the heat of a horse’s flank,
the erratic trot as she tries to buck the sickness.
I try to imagine you cupping her bloody face, but
I have never seen you around horses so instead I think
of your hands, after we made love, you
ran them down the length of my body, each
stroke that of an oar rowing us to shore, how
I’d want to tell you stories then, there in the dark.
The story of how I couldn’t tie my shoes.
My hands like two fish trying to flop to water.
Therapy, nurses, even medicine and eventually
I mastered it, but carry the shame with me.
Oh, how we love those little stories, drag them around
like a retriever with a spit-slimed toy. We love them
as if we could be known by them, as if they weren’t
by definition roadblocks on the path to knowing.
3.
The gray one, I remember, was born two months
after you left. You wrote about reaching inside
her mother to turn her, this slop of legs and
nervous motion, gathered her to your chest
in the cold and named her after me. Now
she is sick and I paw around nature for metaphors,
while nature turns tearing itself to bits.
It shouldn’t matter, I tell myself, your leaving.
After all the body is like a word—vessel
to carry significance, not the significance itself.
But I am untouched, and that untouchedness a wind--
4.
Suspended, remembering your body
and I don’t know where it is. Moving through
the farmhouse in the dark, standing slack
in the stall, searching the shed for a blanket
or digging a hole to bury a dead horse
in fields busily rotting through spring.
1.
One of the horses is sick, the gray one.
Yesterday morning I went to check on her.
Found the fever made her panic, try to kick
out her stall. Gashed her face pretty bad,
down to the tooth. I have been sitting up
with her, trying to keep her calm until the
fever breaks.
2.
How alien fever is from the heat of a horse’s flank,
the erratic trot as she tries to buck the sickness.
I try to imagine you cupping her bloody face, but
I have never seen you around horses so instead I think
of your hands, after we made love, you
ran them down the length of my body, each
stroke that of an oar rowing us to shore, how
I’d want to tell you stories then, there in the dark.
The story of how I couldn’t tie my shoes.
My hands like two fish trying to flop to water.
Therapy, nurses, even medicine and eventually
I mastered it, but carry the shame with me.
Oh, how we love those little stories, drag them around
like a retriever with a spit-slimed toy. We love them
as if we could be known by them, as if they weren’t
by definition roadblocks on the path to knowing.
3.
The gray one, I remember, was born two months
after you left. You wrote about reaching inside
her mother to turn her, this slop of legs and
nervous motion, gathered her to your chest
in the cold and named her after me. Now
she is sick and I paw around nature for metaphors,
while nature turns tearing itself to bits.
It shouldn’t matter, I tell myself, your leaving.
After all the body is like a word—vessel
to carry significance, not the significance itself.
But I am untouched, and that untouchedness a wind--
4.
Suspended, remembering your body
and I don’t know where it is. Moving through
the farmhouse in the dark, standing slack
in the stall, searching the shed for a blanket
or digging a hole to bury a dead horse
in fields busily rotting through spring.
