Ode to Three Horses

“There’s so much new reality,

. . .the marvelous has gotten shy”

Adam Zagajewski, “White Sails”

These are not golden horses, but horses that

conspire with imagining, the first cartoony,

painted on the Dutch door of Glen Echo Garage

to gaze on busy Hudson Street and transcending

the riff on rides with a live horse’s thrum,

the second a swing in a garden skimming air

like a swan gliding on water, a David of a horse

a local Michelangelo freed from a rubber tire,

legs tucked under for speed whom the child

calls Nightmare, the first with ghost-fringe bangs

brushed past startled eyes, the second an impassive

face above a tethered back for rides, and suddenly

a third pouring a lake of liquid shade, a gliding girth,

a horse known by his shadow galloping the sky.