How Folklore Starts

It was during the year when masterpiece was not impossible
but increasingly unlikely — this one — when I heard the announcer
say William Berg's Mass for Three Horses instead of three voices.

At the time I thought, fabulous, this could turn everything around.

The beautiful oven of the August Gulf is seen best from Wisconsin.
Too much hot metal to touch, too many hopes heaped on impossible,
the clippings of which are faded and worn through from your wallet.

A good title but hopeless when I heard them actually harmonizing
not like horses at all, but rhymes like little bells ringing in words
to no purpose but attention to themselves, scaffolds, not Appaloosas.

What more could be done to prepare that story.

After currying, grooming, dressing for dinner in new shoes,
something swirls offshore in overheated uncertainty. You can hear hooves
in the gathering clouds, pawing to begin, a fugue in alternating names.

Allan Peterson
All the Lavish in Common
The Juniper Prize for Poetry
University of Massachusetts Press

Copyright 2006 by University of Massachusetts Press.
All rights reserved.
Reproduced by Poetry Daily with permission.

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