The Mare of Money

Another dead mare waits   

in the shoals of some body   

of water, waits to be burden,   

borne into a foaming ocean,   

where it might become food   

for whales, or, simply empty   

signifier—hair latched to the sea’s undulation   

like Absalom’s beauty   

caught in the playful branches   

of a tree desiring union,   

entanglement, thick confusion—   

but not this mare;   

she does not get the luxury   

of a lyric—a song that makes our own undoing   

or killing sweet even as we go down   

into the fire to rise as smoke.   

This horse must lie, eyes open,   

amongst the stones and fresh water   

crawfish in Money, Mississippi,   

listen to the men’s boots break the water   

as they drop a black boy’s body near her head,   

pick him up, only to let him fall again   

there: bent and eye-to-eye with her   

as though decaying is something   

that requires a witness   

—as though the mare might say:   

he never looked at me again.

Or the boy might say:   

No more. They part   

here—the boy’s body found   

in another man’s arms, carried back   

to town, as the horse says nothing

because horses don’t speak, besides   

this one’s dead.