Just one crack against the sandbar
and the grain freighter crumbled into
itself like paper in flames, all the lifeboats
and blankets, the tons of yeasty wheat
sucked down so fast the tumbling sailors

still carried in the flat backs of their brains
the sensations of the galley, smoky with mutton fat,
someone’s hiccup, someone’s red woolen sleeve
still dragging itself across their eyes

even as the long sleeve of the water closed over them.

It was 3 A.M., the third of November, 1891.
Just to the south of this chaos, where the Columbia
washes over the Pacific,

there was shouting, the groan of stable doors,
and over the beachfront, a dozen
horses were running. Trained
with a bucket of timothy to swim rescue,
they passed under the beam of the Klipsan lighthouse,
passed out from the grasses, alfalfa,
deep snores and the shuffle of hooves,

and entered the black ocean.
Just heads then, stretched nostrils and necks
swimming out to the sailors
who were themselves just heads, each brain
a sputtering flame above the water.
Delirious, bodies numb, they answered
the stallions with panic—
So this is the death parade, Neptune’s
horses lashed up from Akasha!—
                                                   And still

through some last act of the self, when
the tails floated past they grabbed on,

then watched as the horses
returned to themselves, as the haunches
pulled, left then right, and the small circles
of underhooves stroked up in unison. Here
was the sound of sharp breathing, troubled
with sea spray, like bellows left out in the rain,
and here the texture of sand on the belly,
on the shirt and thigh, on the foot
with its boot, and the naked foot—and then, finally,
the voices, the dozens gathered to
cheer the rescue, the long bones of the will,
causing hands to close over those rippling tails,
yellow teeth to close over the timothy.

He is sketching.
First the vein and stamen twitch-strokes
of the white hydrangea, thumb cocked,
three fingers crooked inward—like the cramp
an ice ball offers to the freezing hand.
Then the push, pull, push, pull of
leaves filling in. A stalk. Two joints
where the lemon-necked birds might fasten.

At his back, a stretch of magnolia trees
drops, then is sheared
by the influx lappings of the Mississippi.
Last autumn, he watched from a cargo arc
as his family on the shoreline was reduced
in increments, like the buff, thick candlesticks

that cast to the cabin walls
the neck curls and shadowed chinline of Audubon.
They have traveled eight months—all the widgeons
and hooded mergansers dissected to wands, an acorn
of craw. And for him, the black backdrop canopy
of forest dissected as well, drawn out to
the elements. He is thirteen. Perhaps he will travel

westward, through the bracken and cane-vines, to a separate,
uncatalogued vegetation. A family
from Fort Mandan, he was told, hungry
on the wide plains, once roasted the bulbs of tulips
to a blue mash—and the daffodils they had carried,
the thick narcissus—then entered
their wagons as bulb-sized hailstones
pocked and toppled the carriage mules.

There is an urgency in the thrush, he has learned,
in the partridge and warbler, to enter the backdrop canopy
like a black sky. An absorption there, for an instant,
then a singling out, like eyes
adjusting to candlelight. And perhaps that family

joined them, looking down from their wagons
to the stunned faces of the lost mules,
as the source of their violation
slipped away in increments. Ears, jawline,
and below, the vast, white absorption of the plains.
A blindness perhaps, then. Then the singling out:
half hail, half the spiked white grasses without names.