- Faulkner’s Portrait
painted in a white, honey-colored jacket with a whiskey in one hand, brown trousers to match, the face the color of the jacket, Faulkner has been riding:
white hair awry, his mustache silver-gray the ends turned out in slight contempt, like the riding crop in his right hand— in his left, the glass of whiskey—
a dun-colored brackish brown . . . the color of the horse that plunged into the thick briar brush that held together the forest behind the barn,
a ruined arbor in the high grass below the house, and broke his neck.
Margaret Gilbert has published poems in Crazyhorse, Mudfish, Poetry East, and other periodicals.