It’s in the car while my lover drives that I see it:
the carriage horse on its side on Dallas asphalt,
the cars stopped behind it spilling concerned helpers,
who cannot help, when it spasms like a fish
on a butcher’s steel table. I can’t describe to you
what was happening because I turned away—
grateful, then ashamed for that
gratitude, that I could turn away.
My lover said nothing, then said,
Good thing the city’s banning them in a couple weeks.
But I can only think that the horse can find no comfort
in that, its great rust body stopped at the intersection,
tangled in the reins of the carriage, white and fluffy
as a wedding cake. I wonder if the people it was carrying
feel any guilt, or if they are the kind of people to put
their dog down after it bit someone pulling on its ears.
I wonder, too, if I am much like them, because
my lover and I continue to the art museum,
take pictures together in a room of salt,
while this animal dies in the street
and we know it is dying
and we go off to take pictures together in a room of salt.
I’m frustrated by all these moons nowadays—
Blood and Wolf and Strawberry—and how they all mostly
look the same, how articles proclaiming Last BLANK Moon
For the Next # Years are fear-mongering for poets.
I know this is true, but in this moment in my lover’s car
I think no, there must be more—there must be a moon
under which this doesn’t happen, the horse doesn’t buckle,
and I do not write another poem about Desire and Grief,
asking to be told their difference while holding
the black glassy stare of an animal’s eye losing light.