Book of Horses

there was the first horse

and then the last;

the scheme of horses in between

is immaterial (to say they were muscle

is being kind, they were meat)

but the first horse was the horsehead—

high angular white bones 

and sinew—and the great matter of him broke meaning open

like a disclosure, and there, where he lived, lay the river of the canyon,

all white-tipped like a righteous migration of spines,

and he stilled the water by his will alone 

to better see the startling symmetry of his reflection,

his charge moving him 

somehow faster than the breath’s steady luggage,

across the neckline of the field,

and up and over sugar cane, always

toward starvation: for as terrifying as it is,

forever is a solid,

and from that firstfoal followed his blood

like the flood that begins at the mount 

and streams and cheats and even seems to grow 

by rain that falls by the torso 

but loses itself through the corn husks 

and understory until it is thinner

than the water that comes from a wound

and it settles in the ditch of a cul-de-sac, at rest as a lie.