Horses Dream of Horses
        My Darling Z, My Feverlily —

May I call you
Dearest, may I speak to you
as sweetheart, sugar lump, the honeyed

apple of my — When we first met
you were a gin-swilling art school darling.
When you leaned across the bar to order

I saw the milk-white flesh
below your collarbones, the freckles
shadowboxed by breasts and blouse.

Saw the careful way he wasn't looking.
He did not love me then. I know. I was just
a body then, skeleton held

by whipstitch and slipknot, just synapse, firing
and firing. He was a boy, had fingers
that prodded and opened. Warm body

on the lawn, scapular on the bedstand.
I knew he'd love you better and by year's end
I was right. He left

and I was I again —
a ridged and ridden hillside.
But pardon me. I speak too long

and sit too close. I spent a long year
in the earth, I made you
in my image. I have traveled back

to hear if only once
your voice, to see
the full-moon glint of your incisors.

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Copyright © 2015 Nancy Reddy All rights reserved
from Double Jinx
Milkweed Editions
Reprinted by Verse Daily® with permission