Above the forests,
Past tundra,
Upon glaciers,
We join hands in secret there,
Dance around our merry maypole
Festooned with faded streamers,
Tied with hangman’s knots.
We huddle on the ground in the dim light,
Talking about everything and smiling.
Frozen beneath the ice, almost forgotten,
Sharing our waking dreams, our nightmares,
But un-conscious,
Frenzied brothers and sisters sleep restlessly,
Dazed and chained,
Unshod, bootless in snow,
Riding fiery mustangs
Over rough, icy pavement
Stretched across wintertime benches
Behind iron and walls
Breathing smoke,
Clutching coffee,
Rash and oblivious,
Chasing the moon.
When we, too, look up at that moon
Hanging low by the horizon,
Watch her distant, cold light,
We remember again our own horses,
Once so wild, now so gone.
"Where is my horse?" somebody may think to wonder.
"Where is my horse?" she asks in increasing terror,
Her breath visible, swirling tendrils in icy wind.
"What horse?" I reply bitterly.
"I don’t remember. I don’t have to."
Lying, laying down,
In a snowy angel.
"This horse, silly!"
Another snowbody points at cold, thin air with a mitten
And grins hollowly.
"My horse is in the barn,"
A gentle teenage girl asks plaintively,
"Isn’t it? Isn’t it??"
A bundled man still remembers.
"My barn is gone.
"Burned down, all ashes,"
A warm smile cannot hide
The pain the memory causes.
"And the horses don’t come back, ever.
"They get away. They don’t come back."
A woman in crumpled sorrow, on her knees
And cradling something very long absent
Screams through tears,
"Damn the horses! Where is my son?
"I don’t know him anymore."
Our eyes all trace the moon’s path,
But our feet still rest solidly on ice,
Fortunately or unfortunately.
By and by memories fade again for a while.
And distracted eyes return to this world of ice,
A barren homeland.
And we join the others
Already gathered around warm fire in a barrel,
In stamping our feet as if still dancing,
And talking about nothing
And laughing and weeping.
Together raising new barns all too empty.
Drinking cold beers afterward,
And smiling in sudden surprise at our work,
We can listen for a returning drum of hoofs
And cast long moonshadows
But hear only sighs and the wind.
We stand on this ice,
Shivering regretfully,
In our cold domain,
And dream always
Of an end to pain,
Of sweet peace,
About lost horses.