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—