Blood Prism

Stippling, Winter: Letter to a Tropical Mind

82 Stippling, Winter: Letter to a Tropical Mind Long grasses gone to palomino. Days grown short. As if to diminish, to turn away can be nourish. Not tightening, but slackened time, as the appaloosa standing in this first snow, spot on spot, light and dark and circle within circle, relaxes entirely toward what I’d say was going to be a colder time and dark, but you are dressing all my words in your memories of them, so how explain? There is the half-dappled horse and these white discs whirring so slowly it seems gravity’s turned down, is off somewhere, looking at rooftops, wistful and a little bit 1800s. That century, sepia, as we’ve read about it, or uncolored photographs we’ve seen. Maybe it is true, appaloosa means to you next to nothing, like tyrannosaur, arctic daylight, the words a four-step sound and naught. With Tallapoosa, Apalachee. Maybe you don’t note the grasses going into colors found in yellow stone, snow’s not on the menu in that hemisphere your eyes take in, has not alighted, toe down first and, step by step, melted on your face and hands. Maybe I am writing to you where you always live, equator out of which the days do not get longer or go short, darken. Perhaps you haven’t worshipped animals, but there is one, just here, spotted in the evening sky, out of which this perforated white, the size of your thumbnails, nearly weightless, drifts. It’s colder than it was. The horse breathes, does not move. It’s standing like your heartbeat but completed. We can’t hear breathing, but can see, 83 as if there were a fire within, the horse’s nostrils, smoke. We can’t hear much of anything, in this muffled white, even if it all gets dark and darkness clears to stars that look as cold, are said to burn. ...