Exigencies of the Poem

Ricardo Sternberg

If a horse is standing
perforce it is somewhere.

It is a green prairie
he stands on
with no circumscribing
fence-imagine green
that goes on forever.

He stands solitary
sunk into his sense
of being a horse
alone in the shade.

The poem has grown:
green prairie and a horse
the sun and something else
that provides the shade.

It is the apple tree;
fruitless, the foliage
shaped like a bell
and here, yes, a fence,
hexagonal and white
protects its space.

A bird flies out.

But you said the horse...
Yes. Stood in the shade.

One side of the hexagon
has two of three rails broken
so that (in a time before the poem)
the horse stepped gracefully
out of the sun, into the cool
green shade and stood still.

Now he flicks his tail
and the poem grows again:
a fly landed on his flank
and has been shooed away
into the green that goes
on outside the poem.

And now the poem ends
meeting all exigencies
save two, which are these:
to note the breeze moving
the grass into green waves
and, at the edge of the green
that is inside the poem,
on the outside of that edge,
one who stood and wrote it down.