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She had a death in me, knees drawn up and my bowl and cloth rinsed through with her. As morning takes night, field closes the hare, and ay would burrow into her. Over the altar, catalpas rattle, shadow and bother the branch. Is this her white? Dress me. Her rain? Wash me with that. Her bowl? Feed me empty. Her colding? Ay am forgot. Then mask me the g’wen, hers skin being mine, and body that pools in the brine of her, rivers the silt and stone of her wrapt in the warm of hers fell. She were the watcher and tender of pyres when the wet grass shined with quiet and ay lean to the mouth hole:ay, mother.

I. She Had Some Horses She had some horses. She had horses who were bodies of sand. She had horses who were maps drawn of blood. She had horses who were skins of ocean water. She had horses who were the blue air of sky. She had horses who were fur and teeth. She had horses who were clay and would break. She had horses who were splintered red cliff. She had some horses. She had horses with eyes of trains. She had horses with full, brown thighs. She had horses who laughed too much. She had horses who threw rocks at glass houses. She had horses who licked razor blades. She had some horses. She had horses who danced in their mothers' arms. She had horses who thought they were the sun and their bodies shone and burned like stars. She had horses who waltzed nightly on the moon. She had horses who were much too shy, and kept quiet in stalls of their own making. She had some horses. She had horses who liked Creek Stomp Dance songs. She had horses who cried in their beer. She had horses who spit at male queens who made them afraid of themselves. She had horses who said they weren't afraid. She had horses who lied. She had horses who told the truth, who were stripped bare of their tongues. She had some horses. She had horses who called themselves, "horse." She had horses who called themselves, "spirit," and kept their voices secret and to themselves. She had horses who had no names. She had horses who had books of names. She had some horses. She had horses who whispered in the dark, who were afraid to speak. She had horses who screamed out of fear of the silence, who carried knives to protect themselves from ghosts. She had horses who waited for destruction. She had horses who waited for resurrection. She had some horses. She had horses who got down on their knees for any saviour. She had horses who thought their high price had saved them. She had horses who tried to save her, who climbed in her bed at night and prayed. She had some horses. She had some horses she loved. She had some horses she hated. These were the same horses. II. Two Horses I thought the sun breaking through Sangre de Cristo Mountains was enough, and that wild musky scents on my body after long nights of dreaming could unfold me to myself. I thought my dance alone through worlds of odd and eccentric planets that no one else knew would sustain me. I mean I did learn to move after all and how to recognize voices other than the most familiar. But you must have grown out of a thousand years dreaming just like I could never imagine you. You must have broke open from another sky to here, because now I see you as a part of the millions of other universes that I thought could never occur in this breathing. And I know you as myself, traveling. In your eyes alone are many colonies of stars and other circling planet motion. And then your fingers, the sweet smell of hair, and your soft, tight belly. My heart is taken by you and these mornings since I am a horse running towards a cracked sky where there are countless dawns breaking simultaneously. There are two moons on the horizon and for you I have broken loose. III. Drowning Horses She says she is going to kill herself. I am a thousand miles away. Listening. To her voice in an ocean of telephone sound. Grey sky and nearly sundown; I don't ask her how. I am already familiar with the weapons: a restaurant that wouldn't serve her, the thinnest laughter, another drink. And even if I weren't closer to the cliff edge of the talking wire, I would still be another mirror, another running horse. Her escape is my own. I tell her, yes. Yes. We ride out for breath over the distance. Night air approaches, the galloping other-life. No sound. No sound. IV. Ice Horses These are the ones who escape after the last hurt is turned inward; they are the most dangerous ones. These are the hottest ones, but so cold that your tongue sticks to them and is torn apart because it is frozen to the motion of hooves. These are the ones who cut your thighs, whose blood you must have seen on the gloves of the doctor's rubber hands. They are the horses who moaned like oceans, and one of them a young woman screamed aloud; she was the only one. These are the ones who have found you. These are the ones who pranced on your belly. They chased deer out of your womb. These are the ice horses, horses who entered through your head, and then your heart, your beaten heart. These are the ones who loved you. They are the horses who have held you so close that you have become a part of them, an ice horse galloping into fire. V. Explosion The highway near Okemah, Oklahoma exploded They are reasons for everything Maybe             there is a new people, coming forth being born from the center of the earth, like us, but another tribe. Maybe             they will be another color that no one has ever seen before. Then they might be hated, and live in Muskogee on the side of the tracks that Indians live on. (And they will be the ones to save us.) Maybe             there are lizards coming out of rivers of lava from the core of this planet, coming to bring rain to dance for the corn, to set fields of tongues slapping at the dark earth, a kind of a dance. But maybe the explosion was horses, bursting out of the crazy earth near Okemah. They were a violent birth, flew from the ground into trees to wait for evening night mares to come after them: then                 into the dank wet fields of Oklahoma then                 their birth cords tied into the molten heart then                 they travel north and south, east and west then                 into wet while sheets at midnight when everyone sleeps and the baby dreams of swimming in the bottom of the muggy river. then                 into frogs who have come out of the earth to see for rain then                 a Creek woman who dances shaking the seeds in her bones then                 South Dakota, Mexico, Japan, and Manila then                 into Miami to sweep away the knived faces of hatred Some will not see them. But some will see the horses with their hearts of sleeping volcanoes and will be rocked awake past their bodies to see who they have become.

Her voice is a roundness. On full moon days, she talks about renouncing meat but the butcher has his routine. And blood. M’s wisdom. Still reliable. There are sounds we cannot hear but understand in motion. Slicing of air with hips. Crushing grass, saying these are my feet. I want my feet in my shadow. Suffice to meet desires halfway. Quiet. We say her chakras are in place. When the thermos shatters, she knows the direction of its spill. She knows how to lead and follow. Know her from this. Sounds we cannot hear. The wind blows and we say it is cool. Night slips under the door. We are tucked into bed and kissed a fleeting one. Through the curtains, her voice loosens like thread from an old blanket, row upon row. We watch her teeth in the dark and read her words. She speaks in perfect order, facing where the breeze can tug it towards canals stretching for sound. Her faith abides by the cycle of the moon. See how perfect she is.

She lay all naked in her bed, And I myself lay by; No veil but curtains about her spread, No covering but I: Her head upon her shoulders seeks To hang in careless wise, And full of blushes was her cheeks, And of wishes were her eyes. Her blood still fresh into her face, As on a message came, To say that in another place It meant another game; Her cherry lip moist, plump, and fair, Millions of kisses crown, Which ripe and uncropped dangle there, And weigh the branches down. Her breasts, that welled so plump and high Bred pleasant pain in me, For all the world I do defy The like felicity; Her thighs and belly, soft and fair, To me were only shown: To have seen such meat, and not to have eat, Would have angered any stone. Her knees lay upward gently bent, And all lay hollow under, As if on easy terms, they meant To fall unforced asunder; Just so the Cyprian Queen did lie, Expecting in her bower; When too long stay had kept the boy Beyond his promised hour. ‘Dull clown,’ quoth she, ‘why dost delay such proffered bliss to take? Canst thou find out no other way Similitudes to make?’ Mad with delight I thundering Throw my arms about her, But pox upon’t ’twas but a dream. And so I lay without her.

She longed to be an island, She loved the unbridled madness of them, the islands, She longed to arrive to an island that, perhaps, wasn't an island Divest herself of the ruinous, stony loves She longed to be an island To only inhabit the sea's waistline And not leave or return To only be an island Island of the night Island of the dawn Islands.

Oh, dangling long sleeves in the Mercurochrome. Parking her punch on her knees. I’m not a joiner. In the night, a visitation, small as a thumb, enters the sealed house and ascends. Mother wouldn’t have stood for that long. Drippy-drooping around on heels. Leaving the blue cheese out.

My mother’s named for places, not Sandusky that has wild hair soliciting the moon like blue-black clouds touring. Not Lorain with ways too benevolent for lay life. Ashtabula comes closer, southern, evangelical and accented, her feet wide as yams. She’s Florida Missouri, a railroad, sturdy boxcars without life of their own, filled and refilled with what no one can carry. You just can’t call somebody Ravenna who’s going to have to wash another woman’s bras and panties, who’s going to wear elbow-length dishwater to formal gigs, who’s going to have to work with her hands, folding and shuffling them in prayer.

They perched on roofs and fences and sills. They posed statue-still on catenary lines. They aligned along cables like prayer beads on rope. They amassed en masse on the cemetery lawn and marauded the broad, yawning fields like cattle. Their cackles were black. Each shadow dove and pecked. They nested in chimneys and chirped at the chime of the church bell. They worked in shifts. Clocked out at odd hours. They laid their eggs in the V s of trees. They teemed on the dry-baked banks of creek beds, streams the sun had overseen. They teetered on the bed-knob tops of flagpoles. They pitched like pennies into founts. They pitched like babies into wells. They thumped at doors then skulked away like hoodlum teens. They jabbed her. When she cried they did it faster. Everyone knows what happened next. Some grew big as sunflower stalks, others tall like bonfire flames. Or moving vans. Or the sick, brick houses people die inside of every night. Their hatchlings canopied the sky. Was it her fault, then, when they pinned her to the ground and thrust their feathers down her throat? Or wormed between her legs in bad-man ways? Or rattled plumes and whooped and beat her body with their wings? Or locked their talons to her thighs and tra-la-la-ed that ditty from the old-time music box? Or forced their whiskies past her lips? Or put her in the pillory? This was foreplay, in a way. They rolled in rabid packs and woofed like dogs. She couldn’t throw a bone. The meat was gone. They chased her and they named her and they boiled her tears and bathed her. Then they ate her.

She stands at the top of the stair as childless Tom saw her weep. Fatherless in red Spyders elsewhere rich daughters whiz through Paris or cruise the Greek Islands as non- daddy leaps in grasshopper fashion on a merry-go-round. Tall and bony they’re properly married, endowed. Spared such a fate, the richly poor country girl sometimes resented her tattered state. Having to seek treasures in a briar patch, she found daffodils and violets in dewy meadows mid-March. Now late in the years, the wind lays burnished gold leaves on her feet.

She steps into La Roue de la Fortune movie theater off the Jersey Turnpike, buys a ticket, and so swiftly the waters roll above her instinctual visions:Plaza,Il Piazzo, creep of film over the sound of the words piano,purr, whisper across her neck, one door opens another, in the labyrinthine pitch to preserve order, the expulsion from Eden, the dark soda up her clear plastic straw, reels of rodents, popcorn, teenage workers, acne, blood and circulation turn to ice inside this mechanized paradise, where reality meets the sound of gardens growing past their makers’ dreams, growing strange and outrageous. She stops to check her phone and the phone lights up,Putin,Botox, Trump, the garden grows outward, up, to each side, the ghosts are simply plants who forgot to stop growing; they groan, shriek, quake, giggle, gurgle, stare, and point fingers at the living. I’m glad I’m in love, she thinks.