Asleep in the Lightning Fields

Asleep in the Lightning Fields records observations of memory made as it works inefficiently to hold onto the present firmly and seeks to make concrete those momentary flashes of sense in an otherwise empty expanse. These moments are transitory and peripheral, and the language used to describe them rests heavily on the luck of irony and the bite of ambiguity. The final poem sleeps only fitfully with the awareness that even the most definitive elements of the self are as easily lost to memory as one’s own name.

You hook the hoof with a loop
tied to the hitch of the tractor
and drag him from the pasture
to the barn.

Even though you know he is dead
and it doesn’t really matter anymore
you think about the skin scraped off
from the dark underside and wonder
where it goes.

• Hauling the Dead Horse , from Asleep in the Lightning Fields