Regan Good, "The Rocking Horse"

Regan Good

The Rocking Horse

The Black Horse is rocking Its perfect child.
(Rocking and rocking in methodical heaves.)

By the edge of the North Sea, in the sky over Norway.

He rocks and He rocks and you take what He gives you.

Black Horse rocking with stars in Its eyes,

casting cold from Its runners.

(The shine from Its saddle is the dark of Its mind!)


In the Beast’s mouth: two tools for our tracking: the sun and the moon.


With a body of drawers It comprises the heavens.

In one: three rusted nails and a shroud for His mother.

Then the world’s War Drum snaring its tight skin to rattle.

Here is the face of the wind when it rages.

Here lay three leaves the color of slaughter.

A laugh will escape when the last drawer is opened.


Though nothing is timed by the movements He makes—

the Black Horse rocks backwards and forwards churning the empire onwards

as the blond boy rides on with no face and no name.
_____

Regan Good is a graduate of Barnard College and the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. Her poems have appeared in The Paris Review, Fence, American Letters & Commentary, Lit, Fence and other journals. A chapbook, The Imperfect, was published in 2005 by Westown Press. A second chapbook, The Book of Nature, was published in 2009 by Ugly Duckling Presse.
_____

RECONFIGURATIONS: A Journal for Poetics & Poetry / Literature & Culture, http://reconfigurations.blogspot.com/, ISSN: 1938-3592, Volume Three (2009): Immanence/ Imminence
_____