Another dead mare waits
in the shoals of some body
of water, waits to be burden,
borne into a foaming ocean,
where it might become food
for whales, or, simply empty
signifier — hair latched to the sea’ s undulation
like Absalom’ s beauty
caught in the playful branches
of a tree desiring union,
entanglement, thick confusion —
but not this mare;
she does not get the luxury
of a lyric — a song that makes our own undoing
or killing sweet even as we go down
into the fire to rise as smoke.
This horse must lie, eyes open,
amongst the stones and fresh water
crawfish in Money, Mississippi,
listen to the men’ s boots break the water
as they drop a black boy’ s body near her head,
pick him up, only to let him fall again
there: bent and eye-to-eye with her
as though decaying is something
that requires a witness
— as though the mare might say:
on Tuesday after the rain fell,
the boy’ s neck finally snapped
from the weight of the mill fan;
he never looked at me again.
Or the boy might say:
No more. They part
here — the boy’ s body found
in another man’ s arms, carried back
to town, as the horse says nothing
because horses don’ t speak, besides
this one’ s dead.