Once a week he holds me against him like a child
and I inhale wood and horse and earth, sometimes 
sweat (not sharp with the agony of hurry but warm,  

like a tree trunk seeping sap on a sunny day); I keep 
my eyes closed, as if afraid time will shift like a rocking
boat beneath my feet, and that I will pitch forward  

into the sea of my weariness, so clear I can see
the sandy floor with its shifting shoal grass and blue crabs— 
and my body, always floating at the edge 

where vision and horizon meet, multiplied and ray-
filled, a jellyfish or low hum: If I am very still, 
can I sleep in your barn? I ask, awaking as if from a dream 

about being a horse in a pasture in spring—
that endless meal—my tail long and lengthening. 

 

 

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Charity Gingerich’s first collection of poems, After June (Green Writers), won the Hopper Poetry Prize. Her work has appeared in Arts & Letters, Field, Kenyon Review, North American Review, and Ruminate.