About The Horses

by Albert Abonado

The horse has a royal mane.
The horse in a field with dandelions.

I glaze everything with sweat too. Maybe
I could love this horse. Do horses even sweat?

I research this to confirm. More poems
with science. More evidence, please. Meanwhile,

the horse could be my father or my brother.
I don’t know yet so I pour enough water

until there is a river the horse must tread
across before a flood arrives. This poem

might be about civilization or America, this poem
might be about the people in my family

who drowned. I need to know more. Focus
on the horse legs churning the water. The horse

has borders—horse divided between hoof and belly,
between tongue and teeth and grass. Tired

of horses, I look elsewhere—the clouds, the cities
of new glass. There’s a whole landscape I’ve ignored

that is full of trees: which holds an abandoned nest?
Which could carry my grandfather? Instead, I nap

under a tree with its choir of cicadas. I drink Mountain Dew.
I worry this poem has gotten away from me, that now is the time

for restraint. I look up and find my grandfather dangling
his legs off a tree branch. I want this to be a maple tree

but it keeps being a birch so I say fine, my grandfather
with his legs hanging from a birch tree. I’ve never seen

my grandfather with his pants rolled up
to his knees, his veins like roots.

My grandfather the upside-down tree—this should be
the start of the poem, but I leave it here for now with a note

in the margins to move my grandfather towards
the beginning. My grandfather gets impatient, leaves

in the middle of the poem. I try to summon him
back, say this was only temporary, seasonal—I have more

to discuss: his teeth and his hairy chin, the snow
and his eyeballs, his urine and the ocean—how he could

stroll into the woods forever to become
the moon or apple or carpal tunnel

syndrome. He asks
what about the horses?

ALBERT ABONADO is the author of the poetry collection Jaw (Sundress Publications). He teaches creative writing at SUNY Geneseo and RIT. His writing has appeared or is forthcoming in The Colorado Review, Hobart, Lunch Ticket, The Laurel Review, The Margins, Zone 3, and others. He is the host of Flour City Yawp on WAYO 104.3FM-LP. He lives in Rochester, New York, with his wife and a hamster.