A girl who loved horses and poetry
once told me there are tricks you can do
on the eye-saddle of time—remembering,
for example, slows the animal down,
while gratitude, near acrobatic in its scope,
is a trick with tears only fountains know
better how to do. Mere riding, she says,
is not the way to do it — see the world, that is
—like an outlaw canvassing the landscape
for routes of escape; no, tricks are what it’s all
about, seeing enhanced, seeing as deliverance.
Some just have a knack for it, while others must
work with consternation, fierce attention —
an ointment to the leathery hide they have never fit
between their legs quite as snugly as her:
poet-rider in the eye-saddle, clicking her tongue,
making words go where she wants them,
leading the wind through inertia’s dark grasses.
