words

even grass is fluent, in what she asks, you know, telling stories of the hooves and feet, how many, how long, touching and bending and brushing through on the way to somewhere or to sit on my favorite patch, where everything stretches out, a world map in a small town, but to get there you climb, scramble up the steep gravel path, you fall and the skin rips off your knees in sheets, I still have the brown pebbles inside, thick scar on my right leg, using safety pins to dig them out never enough, up up, pushing one thigh at a time, clumps of clay reach forward, say, hold onto me, and so it goes the whole way up up, scramble-fall-catch-pull-claw-up. Until. At the top nothing but green and the still-bare patches that mark the graves of the palamino and thoroughbred, turned under two summers before, in deep graves the back-hoe dug, and the best two farm dogs I ever knew.