Bright Dead Things - Ada Limón

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as fun as taking a nap, or grass.

      I like their lady horse swagger,

      after winning. Ears up, girls, ears up!

      But mainly, let’s be honest, I like

      that they’re ladies. As if this big

      dangerous animal is also a part of me,

      that somewhere inside the delicate

      skin of my body, there pumps

      an 8-pound female horse heart,

      giant with power, heavy with blood.

      Don’t you want to believe it?

      Don’t you want to lift my shirt and see

      the huge beating genius machine

      that thinks, no, it knows,

      it’s going to come in first.

       1.

      There are so many people who’ve come before us,

      arrows and wagon wheels, obsidian tools, buffalo.

      Look out at the meadow, you can almost see them,

      generations dissolved in the bluegrass and hay.

      I want to try and be terrific. Even for an hour.

       2.

      If you walk long enough, your crowded head clears,

      like how all the cattle run off loudly as you approach.

      This fence is a good fence, but I doubt my own haywire

      will hold up to all this blank sky, so open and explicit.

      I’m like a fence, or a cow, or that word, yonder.

       3.

      There is a slow tractor traffic hollering outside,

      and I’d like not to be traffic, but the window shaking.

      Your shoes are piled up with mine, and the heat

      comes on, makes a simple noise, a dog-yawn.

      People have done this before, but not us.

      It was only months when it felt like I had been

      washing the dishes forever.

      Hardwood planks under the feet, a cord to the sky.

      What is it to go to a We from an I?

      Each time he left for an errand, the walls

      would squeeze me in. I cried over the nonexistent bathmat, wet floor of him,

      how south we were, far away in the outskirts.

      (All the new bugs.)

      I put my apron on as a joke and waltzed around carrying

      a zucchini like a child.

      This is Kentucky, not New York, and I am not important.

      This was before we got the dog even, and before I trusted

      the paralyzing tranquilizer of love stuck

      in the flesh of my neck.

      Back home, in my apartment, another woman lived there.

      In Brooklyn, by the deli, where everything

      was clean and contained.

      (Where I grieved my deaths.)

      I was writing. The great heavy chest of live animals

      I had been dragging around for years; what’s life?

      I made the house so clean (shine and shine and shine).

      I was suspicious of the monkey sounds of Kentucky’s birds,

      judging crackles, rusty mailbox, spiders in the magnolia tree,

      tornado talk, dead June bugs like pinto beans.

      Somewhere I had heard that, after noting the lack

      of water pressure in an old hotel in Los Angeles,

      they found a woman’s body at the bottom

      of the cistern.

      Imagine, just thinking the water was low, just wanting

      to take a shower.

      After that, when the water would act weird,

      spurt, or gurgle, I’d imagine a body, a woman, a me

      just years ago, freely single, happily unaccounted for,

      at the lowest curve of the water tower.

      Yes, and over and over,

      I’d press her limbs down with a long pole

      until she was still.

      The man across the street is mowing 40 acres on a small lawn mower. It’s so small, it must take him days, so I imagine that he likes it. He must. He goes around each tree carefully. He has 10,000 trees; it’s a tree farm, so there are so many trees. One circle here. One circle there. My dog and I’ve been watching. The light’s escaping the sky, and there’s this place I like to stand, it’s before the rise, so I’m invisible. I’m standing there, and I’ve got the dog, and the man is mowing in his circles. So many circles. There are no birds or anything, or none that I can see. I imagine what it must be like to stay hidden, disappear in the dusky nothing and stay still in the night. It’s not sadness, though it may sound like it. I’m thinking about people and trees and how I wish I could be silent more, be more tree than anything else, less clumsy and loud, less crow, more cool white pine, and how it’s hard not to always want something else, not just to let the savage grass grow.

      What should we believe in next?

      Daniel Boone’s brother’s grave says, Killed by Indians.

      We point at it; poke at it like a wound—

      history’s noose.

      Below the grave, a cold spring runs.

      Clear, like a conscience.

      Now, I’m alone.

      Only me and the white bones of an animal’s hand

      revealed in the silt.

      There remains the mystery of how the pupil devours

      so much bastard beauty. Abandoned property.

      This land and I are rewilding.

      A bird I don’t know but follow with my still-living eye.

      The day before me undresses in the wet southern heat—

      flower mouth,

      pollen burn,

      wing sweat.

      I don’t want to be only the landscape: the bone’s buried.

      the movement of the goldenrod, the mustard,

      the

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