I saw three horses in a fenced field
by the narrow highway's edge: white horses,
two uniformly snowy, the other speckled
as though he'd been rolling in flakes of rust...
The poem wants the impossible;
the poem wants a name for the kind nothing
at the core of time, out of which the foals
come tumbling: curled, fetal, dreaming,
and into which the old crumple, fetlock
and skull breaking like waves of foaming milk...
Cold, bracing nothing that mothers forth
mud and mint, hoof and clover, root hair
and horsehair and the accordion bones
of the rust-spotted little one unfolding itself...
"The Source," Mark Doty
[Chicago Avenue east of Winchester Street]
