The Many Woods of Grief: Poems

Logic of Rawhide

34 LoGic of raWhide you close your eyes and plunge a fist, irrationalize a ripple. You squeeze tight, keep the coin dry. She said she’d never leave you. Sweet as honeysuckle in a cobble dream. You played cards through the rain. The silly wishing well game.There’s your water proof, she said. Shook the rawhide from her head. Later, you slept with your tongue stuck to her thigh. Bit of early summer rain-rise. The wing flutter drips a mating call flash long after the finger smash. Crescents applied under eyes 35 to keep from sleeping, you can’t lose her now. Incandescent swell from deep down the nerve-well. So you took the harness to her. Attached her to the tree, till salt pressed stiff the shagbark leaves. You traced a circle around that on horseback. You held it steady, through the night and all the next day. For three straight days. Then you reached the insect phase, the kind that scar the brain. She glowed like sapphire, like worm sweat. You sliced the horse’s eyes with a thumbnail. 36 White blood went like blackbirds in the night. You held on tight and let her bearings form. What needed you now, you hushed it with your hand, spoke to it soft, whispered steady, voice sturdy as a rich man in a suit, in a rain. ...