Our task is to pull horses
dead from the sea but the sea
is too wide and the horses
too heavy. There’s a refuge
from the wind but we are not
welcome there. The pier stretches
into the water where we
stand in the whitecaps because
we like to court disaster.
The stories we tell ourselves
about the stories we tell
ourselves don’t hold water yet
I dream in seas I cannot
fathom. We try to count the
bodies but the numbers seep
into the sea. We cannot
find the horizon. Bodies
are artefacts of the light
and we carry them with us,
these light artefacts, heavy
in our hands. The horses are
dead mounds and they glimmer on
the shoreline. We must lift them.
We cannot lift them. We try.
