Classic Poem

They're gone now, with all they know:
how to be haltered, led,
and bullied into a van. . . .

It doesn't seem much to bring
to a total reckoning. But
no more questions are asked
at that horse show. They'll step
humbly under their headstalls
from the truck-gate, one by one,
into a .22 bullet point-
blank at “an imaginary X
between the eyes and ears” … So much
for a-little-knowledge-as-a-dangerous-thing.

For the rest of it, their dumb drift
of stars/rain/flies/snow/
wind blowing down out of the hemlocks—
never touching the one thing they knew—

must have been like our dreams—
of a vast provenience, yet
ambiguous as to time or place,
logic or meaning. . . . . Almost
one can imagine it goes on for them,
that dream: forty acres of poor
pasture—come fall come winter spring summer—

and little changed, only
by twelve hooves quieter than it was
and the wild strawberries
less trodden on.











By permission of the author.