Leslie Harrison

[Because in all your life you’ve lived]

 

Because in all your life you’ve lived always the same twelve hours

though you remember them otherwise the years with their numbers

the months the anonymous weeks because you don’t understand how

so many differences accrete in the sameness of days because the barn

is again empty the meadow strewn with both sweet and rue because

the horses acquiesce daily to those thin fences because holy means

wholly most surely alone because you believe the horses to be small

gods and because the gods this morning have rolled in mud and have

thundered but again did not jump because when you speak of the horses

the angels bare and gnash their sharpened teeth because the dark belongs

only to itself but the stars don’t mind if you call them your own because

you are the water living between the ice and so many stony places

because you too are all tide and fence all rise and rail because we assemble

the world with imperfect senses because therefore we can never fully

understand because there is a fence between one moment and the next

and this is the fence we acquiesce to and we name that fence time the way

we say event horizon for all that which cannot escape because the horses

did once escape and came from the sea in storm and wreck and because

they never again left but once oh once were never had never been here