Three Poems

By Richard Ali

How Wild Horses Die

A braying in the ear, the scratch of pen on parchment

The heat of radiating blood boiling earth in a shimmering

Of ionized dust and stampeding lust as a virgin comes

Attended by an archer. Everything reels in a swirl of images

I know now how wild horses die, how memory is interred

The smell of earth’s vaporizing musk, how open fields flee

Eyes no longer open. It is the smell that remains, not tears

For if men speak of Oedipus, what can a wild horse say?

Memories of scorching times, to have been raging fair while young

To have always been too old, stallion in the savannah stretch

Now bereft a patrimony of solitude. Others have come in grey

To set feet to flight unto the fences, unto danger

Envy comes desiring space, envy brings the matrix of death

Equines have always known that wild horses never should die;

Perhaps entering mind-span they’ll fade into fields that stay

Ever golden, ever un-owned. But wild horses never should die.

A bird hovers and lowered within it is a rifle – so steel enters

The natural, and though neighing dreams still linger awhile

Some essence scatters with the sound, wildness blanching all around. . .

With my palm I close my eyes in this ashland of youth’s fire.

She-shell

{for Oghale}

She-shell insists on finding me, braving pot-holed seas

Comes to rest at my feet, saying not a word, holding

Hollow lessons of what has gone before, keeping faith

In the promise that love stretches to pick up

Paring the lie of certitudes, eyes do more than mirror

These deeps of greyness; dammed by irises are errant desires

Cresting to breast, fires that at times volcano out like tears,

Raining redemptive pearls on beach sand

Between eternities, my mind explores the subterns – whiffs

Of perfume, cadenced laughter, chance glances glimpsed

At market squares, and such ephemera. Dreams are groves in psyche

Beckoning to our trust. I close my eyes and melt into her dream.

I Hear {II}

Hearing street music with my ear tips I’m

Forced to feel its sadness, to brood and find

A mine of blue notes that turns blood anaemic

Sends poison up brain, salt lines down spine