Horses

Through early morning market echoes,
I walked,
past wood squared shop windows,
resplendent in their cheese rounds
and sunrise sides of ham,
down narrow wynds, still tinged
with slivers of autumn mist.

To the vastness of the fields,
ragged with damp gorse and thistle
and the elms beginning
their morphosis into
grasping skeletons.

And he appeared,
disjointed, emaciated,
twisted as a broken oath.

The light, still growing,
touched thin, copper haunches
as a light breeze raked
the threadbare mane
and swirled red and gold leaves
across his back.

In these revelations of the self,
the bitter truth
of who we were,

I waited in the
unending here and now,
as he lay under
that ashen-blue sky,
not hearing the reproachful crows
rail at the emerging dawn.