Shara Lessley

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The Path

Everything that’s easy,
it seems, we forget—happiness
and sadness—as grass forgets the hum
of our passing. Because my daughter
has a fever, I’m reading her a poem
about a horse as if to show her the field
of words is a world worth entering.
How fine the weather is!, the line reminds us,
the senseless clouds in perfect health
as they drift over groves of silver fir.
By spring the boulders will be swept
by snowmelt; in pools between breaks
the river recomposing itself as now
my daughter recomposes herself
in sleep. Whether she dreams
the chalk trackway where the horse
stops to lick the salt that’s been spilled
for it, who can say? As summer turns
over, making way for fall, the cone
disintegrates to release its seeds.
The horse in the poem reaches a path
that forks near a bridge of strings. Does it
turn back, or cross? Maybe,
waking, she’ll tell me.

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SHARA LESSLEY is the author of The Explosive Expert’s Wife andTwo-Headed Nightingale, and coeditor ofThe Poem’s Country: Place & Poetic Practice. Assistant Poetry Editor for Acre Books, she currently lives in Dubai.