I find this chair—in a forest—to which rays direct light,
a chair to the back of which a crow-coloured gamp is tied,
like a big bat landing, even as whispers keep saying
she is not coming back… from spaces deeper in the woods.
But I am a parent, and I sense a child sitting there, as if
strapped by some blunder of justice to an electric chair,
and as much out of curiosity as from love, I pluck from the air
a first molecule I am allowed to touch by hand and place it,
then a next, molecule by molecule until in the going light
I begin to see her nose, then its nostrils. She breathes in
and breathes out, and I form her lips, cheeks, carefully
like someone interlacing yarn and thread into a rug
while nearly holding their breath. I glue her together
in that chair and watch her watch me build the rest of her,
till morning arrives, in the daydream of whose promise
pearls of frost cling to her, a girl in sparkling jodhpurs
holding a lunge whip, glowing in that forest like a spook.
But knowing curiosity, my taste for discovery, I knew
I was going to stay till night with her, to craft, out of air,
a semblance of her horse my hands were dying to make.