By Joyce Peseroff

Featured Art: Prancing Horse by Jean Louis André Théodore Géricault

She’s teaching him
no harm will slither up his legs
like chilly steam above a pond at night,
or plummet from almost leafless trees
when she saddles his pasture-mate
and they swish between the pointed firs
into spectral woods. Left behind,
alone, he paces the golden perimeter
of fence post and electric wire,
a fragment of eternity falling
red on his rolling shoulder
when he jars the ground beneath
the gnomon in a field
a single maple makes.

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Joyce Peseroff‘s sixth book of poems is Petition. Her fifth collection, Know Thyself, was a 2016 Massachusetts Book Award “must read.” She was founding director of the MFA program at UMass Boston; currently she writes a poetry column for Arrowsmith Press and blogs on writing and literature at <joycepeseroff.com>.

Originally published in NOR 6