Aoife Reilly

Oceans

One chord of that song and I’m back there.
We were free and we knew it,
women and wild horses
at the earthen house by the lake
living life in a Dali painting.
Dusk was pink and the petrified trees
lived their calm lives on water, watching
our frenzy of nothing to lose and everything
to find in that hot blue expanse,
starting our lives with the loud music of beginnings
not knowing then how the light on that lake
keeps dancing us back to opening,
always opening.

Heart of a Horse

Free of moral dilemma or agenda,
they gallop over the dried-up lake
without destination.

They do not wait for the sun to reach earth,
hovering instead over the land
on pink limestone nights with elegance
enough to make a human heart shatter.

It must be easier to be a horse,
free from fighting solitude
inhabiting a wall of steady muscle,
solid gaze into yellow iris
with velvet mouthfuls of silverweed.

I would like to be a foal among them
legs like matchsticks holding the body open,
heart three times a human’s size
stretched in vulnerability above the daisies.

In a dizzying mouthful of summer,
whitethorn is scent made visible
and we do not have to sing sonnets
into stars and satellites,
when the whole world is witnessed
in the eyes of a horse

riding into sea sounds and earth songs
all the way to meet the source
without seeking it through disaster.