THE SABBATH

We weren’t speaking. It was snowing, temps dipping

into the teens. You and I were playing Frisbee

because we’d fought all day, and it’s a tonic

to get outside and throw the sharp disk at one another

with cold dumb hands. Then the animals appeared.

Horses—male, I think—a pair of grayish steeds climbed

the man-cleared path to the softball field

in Prospect Park, where we stood at a distance.

“Wow,” you said, “horses,” but I missed them at first.

I was chasing down the disk that overshot, banked

above, and hissed in the sky, a flattened apple.

I had had it. “Baby,” I almost said, “I’m trying

to make a catch here.” But I was stopped instead,

lofted like the Frisbee. It was the word “horses”

in Brooklyn air. It was their bodies in Brooklyn in 2007.

Though what is the good of horses in Brooklyn in 2007?

As the first came he bowed his head with one step

and hoisted with the next, nodding like a drunk to nobody

he knows, so slowly that, within the machinations

of a single nod, I revised this scene a dozen times

and made a fine behind-the-back Frisbee snatch

to boot. And yes, I remembered the horses of Achilles,

the chariot of Israel, and Emily’s toward Eternity. . .

Sometime I’d like to discuss the horses at length.

Meanwhile the second horse did whatever I say

the first horse did, which is walk, and smoke breath,

glimmer, and gloom. They both shouldered through

the intermittent aeons of twilight as mitigated

by black tree shafts. There were riders, too—

there must have been. They wore fancy sweaters—

red, or was it blue? I even thought to go to them,

gently, and stare into their eyes (the horses, I mean)

to see the candles on the horse-shaped altar inside—

horses are, perhaps, more lovely than a Frisbee—

but that’s not what happened, honey. This

is our life: we fought until dark, we mastered

our timing, you made that magnificent cartwheel toss.

miscellanioupoulis, it's best.