A View of the View
What I can see
from here
isn’t much — the jutting
out brick wall of
the house and a narrow
strip of the horse’s
pasture Confined to
the old barn for almost
a year she’s just
been let out into it
For
ten months she peered
over a narrow gate as
the seasons rang
their changes while
the ugly wound
on her hind leg slowly
scabbed over
Grain bucket to
water trough to hay
flaked from bales
she made her rounds
as geese in
squawking diagonals
rowed by Leaves let
go and spread
their ragged parasails
Snow careened
on the bitter air
which sang
a sorrow song
through old planking
She’d stop at
the gate to crane
her long neck out
and gaze at a landscape
she was no longer
part of —
until an hour ago
I listened
flat on my back
as she took possession
of her weedy acre —
this middle-aged
racehorse distant
offspring of Secretariat
who stood still at first in
the wide-open gate
then stepped out
snorting stopped
and jumped straight up
into the air
Thunderously
she galloped off
— such fierce feeling
and fearsome unatrophied power —
then made her way
along the fence
line with effortless
speed gliding
as if she’d
achieved lift-off
I can glimpse
from bed brick
some grass a
stretch of fence and
tree line beyond it
that walls off
further sight
A lilac bush
flowering
at a corner of
the equipment shed
is the one thing
I can see
all of its scent
when it reaches me
overwhelming as
a slap in the face
If I could get
to the window and push
my head out
I’d see
like the horse
what now
I only smell and hear
From this blinkered view
I can’t tell if
the mare’s still cropping
spring grass
grown long in her
internment
or gone back into
the dark
of the barn as if
outdoors
were too much
Inside a rusty
potato harvester
like the bony skeleton
of a huge fish
shares the space —
a hazard she has skirted
in her endless
circuits
The problem I can’t
solve
is the broken fence wire
I’d left loose
to snarl around the horse’s
leg last summer
It tightened
as she pulled back hard
and yanked
the hide down like a sock
exposing tendon
and raw muscle
Later
that night pulling
a trailer
too small for her
we got held up
on our way
to the large animal hospital
by a 4th of July
fireworks display boom
after concussive boom
drove the horse wild in
her injured confinement —
no view at all
in that cramped
deafening space and miles
to go. Even when
we got her there
she wouldn’t take it lying down —
impervious to sedation
she pinned
a vet against the stall
and took
his breath away
The horse kept faith
with herself something
a creature with 350° vision
will rear up to do
no matter the harm
asserting her belonging
to what matters
most — a thing you
only really know
when you are
being pulled away
from it
Like this view
that isn’t much of one
I take it lying down
as I’ve been told
to do
She’s taken it too
her internment
until she no longer had to
I feel as if I can
see the misty breath
jetting from her nostrils
She whinnies
a crazy glissando
When I am
allowed up to
walk under
my own steam
I’ll have things to
say to her
that will take the form
of carrots and
scoops of grain
I will express it
by filling
the trough clear
to the brim —
the water cold
and nervy
and wanting out
David Weiss's most recent books of poems are Little Mirror (Lynx House) and No One Sleeps Tonight (Tiger Bark Press). His crime novel series, Ditch Witch, is now available on Amazon.