If the Serpent were a Mare

If the Serpent were a Mare

Maybe it’s the sweet almond oil

and all the other subtleties 

of fragrance in the white cream

that bring me to want

the slick rub each morning, a

fragrance only lather

of nose silk slipped into

my  stripped and bloody

cuticles.  And how soon they’re all

staunched, flaring but still

staunched, pushed back, away from

my lips and insistent teeth.

A horse would snatch the way I do,

lower lip first and then pull in

toward the horrible bone that would,

if I’m not absolutely flat, bite me clean

in two.  But I’ll go other places

with her, places I want to go,

where breath is alfalfa grass, is a toss

or two of sweet feed, an apple

in the autumn that sighs up against

my palm, up my nose, and she’s waiting

for more—I wonder does she smell

my morning clean and cream? 

She relaxes more.  Maybe it takes

feeding something as immense as a full-

grown mare to know the held out, flat-as

a-fall-on-the-face-hand is something

more than what it seems.  Because that

apple is secondary, isn’t it.  Really. 

It’s the reach—on her part and mine—

that agrees: some things given, some things

taken are a permission we’d both wanted

all along.  There’s no sin in it, saying yes.