Equus

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During sex, a herd of spavined horses
               runs through my body and out
                              my mouth. You just roister, lover,
                                             never see the andalusians

on the sheets, palominos
               vaulting the bedstead. You don’t
                              hear their hooves cantering
                                             arrhythmia inside me,

mistake their sick whinnies for breathing
               at orgasm, the froth from their mouths
                              for my own rabid dampness, or yours.
                                        They pasture quietly when you are not around,

lip the apple of my womb, trough
               at pools of lymph-’til your ingress
                              sends them bucking through my cervix
                                             up my gut. Even the crows

flap blackly at you, the sheepdogs prick
               ears, and the trout unschool when you come.
                              You come sudden and electric; I am horseless
                                             when you go. Only when you move the things in me

do I remember I put them there, the summer
               they came unshod and started limping
                              through my life, or the summer before,
                                             when I made them into horses in the first place.

I like a metaphor I can domesticate, I guess;
               something I can saddle and spur ’til it bleeds.
                              After you have left, the grassland breathes
                                             with your gone body.

And then I fill it with another kind of longing-
               cats, perhaps, hosts of them teeming with mites-
                              anything, really, to feed on the field
                                             of this feeling.