Sestina

Meredith Frazee

Small furred creatures abandon tunnels beneath the grass. 

More country falls under my picture-making knife.

All day under the smaller mountain the horses

hear the electric fence snap and tremble;

its white line billows out like for laundry to dry

and behind it the brush is very green.

Summer hits the gas fast and grows green.

All grass to me looks like grass.

Here the wind is less sweet than dry,

cuts the lungs with a long soft knife,

is so thin it makes ribs burn and tremble

and whispers like the throats it hoarses.

My feet fit in the stiff mash-marks of former horses

as the next ones come to wander the open green

where that wind makes even their smallest hairs tremble,

hairs that can’t be distinguished from light tousled grass

the kind in a painting hung in the post office, or reflected in the metal of a knife

dividing now and after, touch from the writing of touch, fresh from dry. 

When you wake in the night, mouth dry,

stumble out to piss where the river sounds like far-off horses

and the loss in waking stabs you, again you wait for the knife…

The beauty of this place ages you, who came here green

and fresh and sappy; now, a lot lies under the tough grass

and anyway your heart was played out, an old dog trembling.

The gold is sunny wind making the leaves tremble,

is just water, after swimming, on a loved body sprawled to dry.

Just before the beginning it was all yours, even the grass,

and you belonged back, dreaming of ants and horses

and foxes at night whose eyes gleam green.

Again and again, a cut from the strange knife

that parts you from you, summers ago leaving at a party the kitchen knife

with your grandmother’s name on the handle, the tremble

of cars on gravel roads splitting home and here, and every summer greens

in memory, ripens, like how the moon could hang lush as fruit but be bone dry—

again and again it rises liquor-sharp in the blood while murmuring horses, 

at night invisible, their huge hearts invisible, eat the moony grass.