Fields full of horses sweating
under winter blankets.

Summers of swatting flies
that bother liquid brown eyes.

In dense foliage I hear nothing
of jack rabbits

and there is nothing
to prove the horses I once rode

or those my daughter
evented in her steel vest.

Only a blur of green says that sleep is pain
and pain is sleep.

In these two states one can dream
another self, the animal

I wished for myself –
a future of awkward, momentous

occasions spent alone
fording spring mud,

examining the lace of fungi
in a prehistoric solstice light.