In Horse Latitudes

What does the sea want, my clothes, my keys, my face?

This is the mind's Sargasso,

Expansive as Kansas flatlands, the big dead place.

The weeds stir, they make promises; I'm light as a shell.

Immobile, the sea bottom

Glints at my emptiness with ship's tackle, jewels,

Railway tickets, photographs: the blue-eyed platoons

Grin up from their doomed jungles.

I am left with nothing to hold, nothing to do

But imagine those horses the Spaniards abandoned here:

At night I have seen them rise

To graze the glassy prairie and whinny their fear.

Anxious, disconsolate,

They sniff for a wind. Sour water drips down their tails.

Ghost horses, I am like you: when the gray line of a sail

Threads the horizon, my heart strains forward too:

Heavy with salt, the blood

Leans like a tide, but has no place to go.