Equitation

When the horse began to charge us, 
I thought, Maybe I can take him. 
It was the same vacant courage that 
invents shortcuts through gated fields.
We backed up to an irrigation ravine. 
The husband’s legs are tall as sunflowers, 
and he leaped across like a Russian ballerina. 
I leaped, too, my feet like cans of paint, 
soaked my right sneaker in some brownish wet 
as I fell up and down the other side, the sound of 
hooves reverberating against a rained-out sky. 
The horse could jump the ravine, but when 
you are running for your life, you learn to deal 
with one problem at a time. He grunted on the bank, 
stamped a foot as we 

escaped over a stone wall. I said, 
That horse almost killed us, like I was 
the goddam Narrator. The husband looked 
at my bespoiled sneaker. Anger thinned his face
before he laughed. Harder than I’d ever seen. 
Doubled over, hands on knees, flushed cheeks, 
his mouth open as a field. 
I laughed, too. At the horse, at us, this expensive 
holiday, our bed and breakfast, at every sunken 
possession like fence posts, dividing 
empty bodies from other bodies.