Sample Poems by Dana Sonnenschein
The Memory Horses
The horses in the pasture behind the house
never seemed to belong to anyone.
They came, big as gods, to the fence
every afternoon and stared back at me,
blinking away flies, knocking the wood
with a hoof now and then.
I knew to hold my hand flat
when offering them grass, to stand
perfectly still and let the hot breath
and whispery lips pass, as if there were
nothing, over my palms, and to move
around them as if no horses
were there, the way the shadows
moved around the pine trees.
The memory horses, brown and buckskin,
still bump their bony foreheads
against my shoulders, offering the softest
spot to touch, the stretch between
flickering nostrils and ears.
There is a gap behind their teeth
where the bit lies easily,
and they cannot feel my hands
in their manes when I mount.
Because they have never left the pasture,
because they barely change the grass
they live on, the memory horses still pass
through the world, invisible, and gallop,
evenings, as if there were no shadows,
as if the world were not there,
moving carefully, painfully around them.
Slow Miles
A few blocks away the roads turn to gravel,
and the long, low hills are ordered
by furrows that bend to their contours.
We have been walking here so many times
our steps and voices are worked into rows
like the slow equation of corn and sun
that foretells itself at twilight:
a rustling that steadily turns to gold.
The hour's ripe ears and tassels are reduced
to black and white, as if it were the moon
and night that knew the coming cold
and not the grain of summer growing
from a fodder of last year's stalks.
A dog barks as strangers pass, hard sounds
breaking through an orchard that winter
picks clean, neater than any harvest.
Our words echo one another and fade
in the chill after dark. They show the shape
of breath, like the mist that rises
and repeats the creek, stripped of cover
and beginning to freeze. Every year
we are brought to a standstill
by the water's simplicity: it curves earth
and the ice flowing from fall to spring.
From here, the last farmhouse's windows seem
to stand alone, without walls defining
inside and outside. We don't know who
lives there, maybe an old man, maybe
a woman and her daughter, together,
apart but in the same shape. We walk
farther because there is more to say;
we look at each other more than away.
But suddenly, squinting, my mother says,
Are those stones in that pasture
or loaves of hay? I cross the road
and can't tell, go right up to the fence.
Horses stand, sleeping, scattered.
Their heads droop toward the ground,
and shadow pares and pares the rest;
their broad backs are like buttresses
holding up the sky. We turn homeward,
and the road carefully parts the fields
it joins, so we can pass between.
Playing Possum
Maybe the small prowler
had pushed the cracked plastic
to get in but couldn't split
the barrel to get out again.
How it hissed and scrabbled
for a chance at more
than dark concavity--
yet when I lifted the lid,
I found nothing but red eyes
blinking, blinking out.
How long had it been?
Two nights at least I dreamed
of noises in the garage
below my room. Once
a thief, once a ghost.
Anything was possible.
I saw only briefly what
turned out to be a possum
braced like a dirty star,
its four pink hands and tail
gripping the trashcan's rim
just past where I held on
as my mother swung
a broom against the bottom.
The can skidded. She yelled.
The possum did not run
or even budge.
Such rigid fear played
neither at death nor disposal,
and so we left it alone.
It had gone by evening,
unseen, leaving only marks
like teething and shadows
shifting beneath the cars.
On Finding a Horseshoe
This road's intent is unpaved:
it goes east. When I look up
I get a pretty good grove,
wind tugging at sheaves of oak,
wind carrying cottonwood seeds,
and cabbage butterflies drifting
toward green fields of alfalfa.
But I look down too much, watching
so I don't wrench an ankle
in the ruts, shielding my eyes
from the etching of white dust,
clouds raised by passing cars.
They're praying for rain
this summer, those graying farmers
out behind their barns, putting in
the last field late in May. I'm not
praying. When I sat in a lawnchair,
staring at a blackbird corpse
in the uncut grass, I was not praying.
A scribble of flies buzzed
over the jut of breast
and cartwheel of tail-feathers.
I'd avoided that dead bird for days,
but, finally, made myself have a look.
The eye was eaten away,
but the jab of beak was intact,
its resolve to ask for nothing.
The feathers on the body were dark
and unruffled. I couldn't pick it up.
My eyes sink toward a dark
blur in the gravel. A horseshoe.
A humble, hoof-shaped thing, dropped
barely a mile from the stable, so
unimportant its owner didn't bother
to turn back and look for it.
I kneel, observe its flat cup.
Caked with dirt, one bent nail
hanging from a slot, how dumbly
the horseshoe asks to be picked up--
it has no life here in the road--
and what a small gesture it takes
to fill it with luck.