The Album of Horses
The dust jacket is falling apart.
On the front, the horse and her foal,
white and brown, brittle now. And the red painted
panels of a stable wall on the back,
ready to crumble away,
pieces of book dust
horse dust.
You dream of horses— you told me
that’s how you fall asleep at night, and I’m sure
you didn’t imagine how happy this made me,
you showing me how you let go
walking into the green field
where the horses are waiting,
where I imagine them now, resting,
leaning down for a ripped mouthful of grass
or brushing against a companion’s flank.
Slow thoughts. Slow thoughts sliding by
as the wind crosses their backs without even lifting the hairs.
The skin ripples,
twitches under some lazy buzz.
When do you drift off? We never know, do we?
Partway across the field?
Or close enough to feel the animal heat—
already, the slipping away as fleeting
as dream itself. Palominos,
I read, are not a breed
but a color more gold than gold.
Little Clouds
Turn my pockets out and there’s sand,
there’s always sand, no matter how far I go
from where I began.
But today, there are some clumps
of what had been a scrap of paper, now a wad
of little clouds, all their ink washed away.
This fluff is like something just born,
Before all definition.
I read somewhere that people once believed
bears licked their formless newborns
into being. In their winter caves,
bears shaping tiny bears with their tongues.
The sky is white today, and soft, too soft to write on.
Someone has found a way to write in water
so the writing stays, at least a little.
You need an implement so small
that moving it to trace a shape won’t create
an eddy that carries the word away.
So far, they’ve managed a hovered J, a G, a U
within the dot of an i.
Me, I’ve always liked how words dissolve
in water, dissipate in air.
Walking home, I see a puddle the size of a quarter.
It holds the sky’s reflection,
a milky white eye
on the darkened ground.
Kelly Terwilliger is the author of two collections of poems, A Glimpse of Oranges and Riddle, Fish Hook, Thorn, Key. She lives in Eugene, Oregon, where she works in schools as an oral storyteller and teaches storytelling to children and adults.
Sparks of Calliope 