In a blue collusion of dusk
and rain, the sky’s darkly shaking
like horsetails flicking
off bloodflies. As you’d try
switching off half-truths that fed
on your skin, their little bites
distracting you
from harder pain.
Nothing a hoof could gallop from. Nothing to ride here
but air
coolly passing from stable to woods—
each leaf a perforated heart—
to the front porch of the blue house. As you ascend,
the steps darken behind you, night
has its own quiet stepping—it is not
an abyss, not amorphous
as once you felt—.
How wavery the rain at the threshhold—
Copyright © 2018 Alessandra Lynch. This poem originally appeared in Kenyon Review, November/December 2018. Used with permission of the author.