Sunday, with two weeks of heat lifting from us in a light rain. A good day for work with the break in weather; then the race, the great horse faltering, my wife and daughter leaving the room in tears, the dinner strangely silent, with a dull, metallic yellow cast to the evening sun. We turn from the @3repeats@1, once is so much more than enough. So the event fades and late in the night writing in the kitchen I look at the floor soiled by the Airedales in the heatwave, tracking in the brackish dirt from the algae-covered pond. I want the grace of this physical gesture, filling the pail, scrubbing the floor after midnight, sweet country music from the radio and a drink or two; then the grotesque news bringing me up from the amnesia of the floor. How could a creature of such beauty merely disappear? I saw her as surely as at twilight I watched our own horses graze in the pasture. How could she wake so frantic, as if from a terrible dream? Then to continue with my scrubbing, saying it's only a horse but knowing that if I cannot care about a horse, I cannot care about earth herself. For she was so surely of earth, in earth; once so animate, sprung in some final, perfect form, running, running, saying, "@3Look at me, look at me, what could be more wonderful than the way I move, tell me if there's something more wonderful, I'm the same as a great whale sounding@1." But then who am I sunk on the floor scrubbing at this bitterness? It doesn't matter. A great creature died who took her body as far as bodies go toward perfection and I wonder how like Crazy Horse she seems to leave us so far behind. | Discover our Poem Explanations and Poet Analyses!Other Poems of Interest...THE CHAPERON by HENRY CUYLER BUNNER CONTENTMENT, AFTER THE MANNER OF HORACE by CHARLES STUART CALVERLEY STREET LANTERNS by MARY ELIZABETH COLERIDGE THE WRECK OF THE HESPERUS by HENRY WADSWORTH LONGFELLOW TO THE RIVER CHARLES by HENRY WADSWORTH LONGFELLOW THE MARCH INTO VIRGINIA by HERMAN MELVILLE THE RUBAIYAT, 1879 EDITION: 13 by OMAR KHAYYAM |