(St. Laurent Sur Mer, June 5, 2009) Sometimes the day light winces behind you and it is a great treasure in this case today a man on a horse in calm full gallop on Omaha over my left shoulder coming on fast but calm not audible to me at all until I turned back my head for no reason as if what lies behind one had whispered what can I do for you today and I had just turned to answer and the answer to my answer flooded from the front with the late sun he/they were driving into—gleaming— wet chest and upraised knees and light-struck hooves and thrust-out even breathing of the great beast—from just behind me, passing me—the rider looking straight ahead and yet smiling without looking at me as I smiled as we both smiled for the young animal, my feet in the breaking wave-edge, his hooves returning, as they begin to pass by, to the edge of the furling break, each tossed-up flake of ocean offered into the reddish luminosity—sparks—as they made their way, boring through to clear out life, a place where no one again is suddenly killed—regardless of the "cause"—no one—just this galloping forward with force through the low waves, seagulls scattering all round, their screeching and mewing rising like more bits of red foam, the horse's hooves now suddenly louder as it goes by and its prints on wet sand deep and immediately filled by thousands of sandfleas thrilled to the declivities in succession in the newly released beach—just at the right moment for some microscopic life to rise up through these cups in the hard upslant retreating ocean is revealing, sandfleas finding them just as light does, carving them out with shadow, and glow on each ridge, and water oozing up through the innermost cut of the hoofsteps, and when I shut my eyes now I am not like a blind person walking towards the lowering sun, the water loud at my right, but like a seeing person with her eyes shut putting her feet down one at a time on the earth.
Copyright © 2011 by Jorie Graham. Used with permission of the author. Previously published in The New Yorker.