Sunday, with two weeks of heat lifting from us in a light rain. A good day for work with the break in weather; then the race, the great horse faltering, my wife and daughter leaving the room in tears, the dinner strangely silent, with a dull, metallic yellow cast to the evening sun. We turn from the @3repeats@1, once is so much more than enough. So the event fades and late in the night writing in the kitchen I look at the floor soiled by the Airedales in the heatwave, tracking in the brackish dirt from the algae-covered pond. I want the grace of this physical gesture, filling the pail, scrubbing the floor after midnight, sweet country music from the radio and a drink or two; then the grotesque news bringing me up from the amnesia of the floor. How could a creature of such beauty merely disappear? I saw her as surely as at twilight I watched our own horses graze in the pasture. How could she wake so frantic, as if from a terrible dream? Then to continue with my scrubbing, saying it's only a horse but knowing that if I cannot care about a horse, I cannot care about earth herself. For she was so surely of earth, in earth; once so animate, sprung in some final, perfect form, running, running, saying, "@3Look at me, look at me, what could be more wonderful than the way I move, tell me if there's something more wonderful, I'm the same as a great whale sounding@1." But then who am I sunk on the floor scrubbing at this bitterness? It doesn't matter. A great creature died who took her body as far as bodies go toward perfection and I wonder how like Crazy Horse she seems to leave us so far behind. | Discover our Poem Explanations and Poet Analyses!Other Poems of Interest...THE TEMPER (1) by GEORGE HERBERT MAHMOUD by JAMES HENRY LEIGH HUNT ROBIN ADAIR by CAROLINE KEPPEL THE LEADEN-EYED by NICHOLAS VACHEL LINDSAY BY THE PACIFIC OCEAN by CINCINNATUS HEINE MILLER ODES: BOOK 1: ODE 15. TO THE EVENING STAR by MARK AKENSIDE MILLS OF DESTINY by EVA K. ANGLESBURG |