The Horse Graveyard from Issue 93
Those summers before blood stickied
our thighs, chests bony as sparrows’, we trekked
to the neighbor’s pasture where we kept
our ponies, riding bareback till dusk,
straw-haired and feral under the wide sky—
our own 30 acres of Eden. We knew things then:
what it was to slice into green cool
of the pond down to the flat rock where we sat
cross-legged like war-chiefs; how speed
could swallow us, take us till it was all
there was, stealing our breaths, manes
stinging our cheeks. Trust, trust,
our ponies’ feet sang in the tall grass.
But I should also tell how in the empty hours
we snuck to the burn-pit—kicked our horses
down the dusty road past “Keep Out”
signs until they would not budge,
tied them to branches of scrub oaks,
their nostrils flared, raw pink membranes
all dread, then rounded the corner on foot
to where dead horses lay blackened
on their sprawling pyres, the stench
of their unburned parts souring the clearing,
their hides like matted rugs. We picked our way
to the bleached bones of the long-dead, hunkered
to our job of prizing molars from their jaws
to trade at the bead seller’s for turquoise rings
we’d wear to the movies on Friday nights,
our heels planted hard against the skulls
for the lurch of unsocketing.
I should tell how while we worked
the buzzards coughed and thumped
along the ground, their scorched meals
interrupted, then wheeled above us
as we trotted the shortcut through a sallow keloid
of cornfield toward the barn, our plunder
clacking in our pockets. Black wings
thrummed sluggish rhythms
we had not even thought of yet, whispered
the torpor of slow dances, slur
of too much beer, languor of hot backseats,
and the slow turns of betrayals—
how that next summer or the next
we left our ponies waiting in their field
while we went out to plumb the world.