Nine Horses Read Free Page B

day
    and always hope the next one up ahead
    is a shredded tire, a discarded brown coat,
    but there they are, assuming
    every imaginable pose for death’s portrait.
    This one I speak of, for example,
    the one who rode with me for miles,
    reminded me of a small Roman citizen,
    with his prosperous belly,
    his faint smile,
    and his one stiff forearm raised
    as if he were still alive, still hailing Caesar.

Roadside Flowers
    These are the kind you are supposed
    to stop to look at, as I do this morning,
    but just long enough
    so as not to carry my non-stopping
    around with me all day,
    a big medicine ball of neglect and disregard.
    But now I seem to be carrying
    my not-stopping-long-enough ball
    as I walk around
    the circumference of myself
    and up and down the angles of the day.
    Roadside flowers,
    when I get back to my room
    I will make it all up to you.
    I will lie on my stomach and write
    in a notebook how lighthearted you were,
    pink and white among the weeds,
    wild phlox perhaps,
    or at least a cousin of that family,
    a pretty one who comes to visit
    every summer for two weeks without her parents,
    she who unpacks her things upstairs
    while I am out on the lawn
    throwing the ball as high as I can,
    catching it almost
    every time in my two outstretched hands.

As If to Demonstrate an Eclipse
    I pick an orange from a wicker basket
    and place it on the table
    to represent the sun.
    Then down at the other end
    a blue and white marble
    becomes the earth
    and nearby I lay the little moon of an aspirin.
    I get a glass from a cabinet,
    open a bottle of wine,
    then I sit in a ladder-back chair,
    a benevolent god presiding
    over a miniature creation myth,
    and I begin to sing
    a homemade canticle of thanks
    for this perfect little arrangement,
    for not making the earth too hot or cold
    not making it spin too fast or slow
    so that the grove of orange trees
    and the owl become possible,
    not to mention the rolling wave,
    the play of clouds, geese in flight,
    and the Z of lightning on a dark lake.
    Then I fill my glass again
    and give thanks for the trout,
    the oak, and the yellow feather,
    singing the room full of shadows,
    as sun and earth and moon
    circle one another in their impeccable orbits
    and I get more and more cockeyed with gratitude.

Trompe L’Oeil
    It was one thing to notice
    that behind the pepper mill on your kitchen counter
    there was an identical pepper mill
    painted on the white tiles,
    and that behind the saltshaker
    and the bottles of oil and vinegar
    exact images of themselves
    had also been applied there to fool the eye.
    But it was another thing—
    a higher note in the opera of Art and Life—
    to see that the bundle of asparagus
    you brought home for dinner,
    bound with a red rubber band,
    upright in a ceramic bowl of water,
    stood before its own painted version,
    a meticulous, Platonic rendition of itself.
    I kept you company in the kitchen,
    drank a little wine while you chopped and stirred,
    watched you loosen the bundle
    then trim and cook the stalks
    while the flat, timeless, inedible
    likeness of asparagus lingered on the wall.
    We had crostini that night,
    portobello mushrooms, grilled salmon,
    and, of course, buttery asparagus.
    And as I ate each spear,
    I kept one eye on the portrait of asparagus—
    the memory and ghost of the vegetable,
    a thing beyond our devouring.
    Even after I shut the door to the guest room
    and fell into the soft bed,
    I thought about the double serving of asparagus
    offered up by you,
    one for the eye and one for the tongue.
    As I lay in the heavy darkness,
    I felt like David Hume or William James
    contemplating the nature of asparagus,
    its troublesome epistemology—
    the appearance of its ferns and fibrous stalks,
    the reality of its succulent green tips.

Creatures
    Hamlet noticed them in the shapes of clouds,
    but I saw them in the furniture of childhood,
    creatures trapped under surfaces of wood,
    one submerged in a polished sideboard,
    one frowning from a