Teaching My Horses to Read

by Thomas Rabbitt

One dark eye always looked away like
January and the wind took care of pages.
They chose anything: death, love, hearts that leak
Chamber to chamber, geometry, the stages
The Horse went through. What they’d been missing
Was the world beyond pasture when gods lived
And men breathed water. They were kissing
The leaves of the book and, had I not loved
Strange unalterable air, I’d have said
They were mistaking the pages for food.
Behind them, always, some danger about to erupt.
Overnight, grass became jimson and the dead
Browsed until dawn. They left nothing good.
Nothing one learned cannot delight or corrupt.

                                                                      —from The Booth Interstate (Knopf, 1981)


The author of several books of poems—including Exile (1975), The Booth Interstate (1981), The Abandoned Country (1988), Enemies of the State  (2000), and Prepositional Heaven (2001) — Thomas Rabbitt has retired from his teaching career and currently lives and writes in Tennessee.  In 1972, he founded the MFA program in creative writing at The University of Alabama.  In Fall 2004 NewSouth Books will release American Wake: New & Selected Poems.

selected by Dan Albergotti