How Death Came to the Horse
Guanacaste, Costa Rica

It came to her in the long field
near men with purple shirts and callused hands
who did not see, men who raised amber glasses
or turned from the table to spit
semillas de las sandias into the dust
while salsa blared through static on the patio.
It came to her while the battered handmedown bus
brilliant with hummingbirds, rainbows, toucans
in painted paradise, ground up the rutted hill
to Monteverde. Tourists and ticos did not see
how it came to her while milch cows
and one lone Brahma bull, its hump
the shadowy brown of dust and honey,
grazed, swinging their heavy heads
near cattle egrets that thronged low spreading trees
like linen hung to dry, like hunchbacked angels.
But it singled her out and she accepted it,
lay down beneath the sun,
put her legs out stiff and straight
while men drank or laughed or spat out seeds.

Copyright © 2003 Ann Fisher-Wirth All rights reserved
from Blue Window
Archer Books
Reprinted by Verse Daily® with permission