Her Holy Meal

Her Holy Meal

I tripped on the threshold and sprawled into
the fodder on the floor, unable to ever
stand again. In the black barn I passed
an hour’s year, face in the stalks, too spent

to push the ground away with my beaten
arms, and I approached the brink of endless,
endless tenebrae with a coat of
feigned relief. It came to me after a

time, the heavy quake, the machine song,
an acre’s issue of stones in a polishing drum.
And when I managed the strength to lift one
eyelid, ponderous as a stove-lid,

my seeing her was simultaneous with
my scenting her. Above me, near me, enormous
and looming, the mare watched me as she chewed
her oats. And when I got my muscles to

obey me at last, it seemed that her face, lengthy
as a prairie skull, assisted me in my turning.
Supine and gasping, I looked up into the eyes,
staking me with their stare, and felt fear’s pick

when her head moved out of sight to lip
more oats into her teeth, her great square
gristing teeth, and her eyes pulled my hand
up from the straw, up to her head so slowly,

up to rest on the warm hide of her cheek,
and I felt the grinding of her holy
meal beneath my fingerprints, the whorls
and loops and points that mark out my own

corral on this plain. I cannot know
how long I read her life through her cheek,
but when I jerked awake in gray daylight
I missed the rumble-touch, the whiff of guardian.

~ by S.K. Orr