Poetry

 

 

Lynn McGee

San Diego

1.

The aging brown quarter horse,
hooves hard as petrified wood,
once let no one touch her head.
Now my sister combs the coarse ledge
of a forelock, swabs corner ducts
of the oil-rich eyes,
lifts the animal's heavy gray lips
to examine blocks of teeth and kisses
the dust-colored muzzle.
My niece balances an apple
on one upheld palm,
eighteen-hundred-pound animal gingerly
mouthing it up and back to molars
like fists, loud crack
as the fruit splits.
She lifts the horse's knobby leg,
straddles it and digs at the shoe
with a curved metal pick.
She rolls fly repellant
from a stocky tube,
drawing a mask on the animal's
huge face.

2.

Today, we rode trails
that tattoo the desert,
canal's cool fingers over lawns
bright as limes.
Bobcats crouch in bristling hills,
haunches twitching,
eyes dilating with pleasure,
marking vectors to some rabbit
lapping the concrete stream,
wary and broad-eyed,
like the horse,
scanning wide swaths
of landscape,
programmed to bolt.
Predator, prey complete each other,
some believe,
desert mutating colorfully around them,
barbed wire and highways
delineating tin shacks and salad bars
lit with lively neon sombreros.

3.

In baked sienna suburbs,
men arrive at sunup
with shovels and hoes.
Borders tug like tide.
Head south on Interstate 5,
there's a battered yellow sign,
Warning printed on top,
Xing below,
and silhouetted between,
a storybook family sprinting
across hot asphalt lanes —
mother, father, girl in pigtails,
small boy yanked along,
feet flying—no image showing
what chased them
to that passage,
or what lies waiting
on the other side.

 

What Changes the Pond

No sun that day,
the pond a smudge of pewter,
trees rusting along its border —
then the ocean begins to ruffle
a thousand miles away,
hurricane biting pieces of shore,
punching a swath
through clusters of houses,
one town clenching,
then the next,
cars up to their teeth
in the clotted current,
sidewalks velvet with mud,
wind galloping northward,
scouring ridges and valleys,
pine trees swaying feebly,
plates of warm and cold air shifting,
blocks of dark cloud
sheered off like meat,
sunlight gliding its blade through the gap,
illuminating forest, field, farm —
and then the pond became a mirror.

 

 

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