Classic Poem

When he walks towards them they come up
for the sheaf of long grass
he’s holding out. They’ve been
left alone far too long. What he notices
are flakes of fire —
diamonds of rain drops —
scattering from the grass blades, a
mix of green stalk, clover, unripened
seedheads. So they move up
across the paddock, the smaller horse loping
sideways, the mare crossing over
as if something’s filled the space,
wordless, expectant:
the man just waits,
half-focussed on the day’s brew
of thunder, rainstorm and lightning an hour ago,
the wreckage of last year’s fires.
Today it’s all humidity, grass rain
turning the surface deeply green.

This moment’s distractedness is
nothing to do with lack or
failed inclination. It’s just that the
air’s stillness — utter rain-ceased stillness,
clean as an empty white bowl — has led to another dark,
another breath, or seethe, of darkness:
a single dove whooing from the trees stays hidden in it,
a half-registered burst of cicada-noise, like a blanket
down the ridge, billows it up,
curves it into waves.

It’s just, too, that the horses
trotting over have
sized him up in glance which itself
travels, like a shadow, across the air, across the grass,
within its own unmeasured horizon, its own sputter
of diamond light. As if she’s someone famous at a party,
the mare looks out over the man’s shoulder.
The cicadas, the cuckoo-dove, are interrupted by a butcher bird.
What he sees is how densely the rain front
has anchored the horses,

heavy bodied things, satin-
bright with wetness,
dark bulks grazing this fenced in place
amongst the new-grown feed. (Electric thinness, sharpness,
humid thickness: air builds its surrounds, soon passing them by.)
Presence being masklike (a face in glinting water) the horses
wait for words maybe, or company. Then they
go back to cropping grass, rough manes the colour of a
cloudy moonless night bent forward to the ground
in a space green as a billiard top beside the trees.