Your horse

 

No matter the heat, the place was cooler.

Its shade wasn’t ordinary. Its strategy was of sharply

dragging the day under, of growing into the bodies

we’d angled under the tree, filling us as if we’d barely

 

made it up from the dirt. You’d hold on to the tree, for it

were a horse’s neck. I was always the first one to get up

and leave, being no good at making nothing of a free

day then. You were good because you’d never thought

 

about how to be good. A splintery broom, a pair of feelers,

a miniature skull of fungus would do it. The shadow made

your riding town no less busy. Except for a day

when I came and the place was in sunlight

 

like a body of water. Water folding sheets of water.

The tree was only the ghost of your horse and it had

forgotten all rain. It set its hooves in the dust.

It became necessary to visit again and again. For your

not being there to continue, and to become shadow.