He told us a story of lightning splitting the lone tree
on a hill's top, killing three horses beneath it at once.
They lay that way through winter; come May, their
licked-clean bones gleamed from a bed to green tendrils
and clover. We knew it had meaning, the way he said;
nature takes care to spirit back what's hers; they'd
been his best. We watched him talk, then he stopped.
This comes to me today just as a curtain of white
sweeps the vineyard, buds thrashed by torrents combing
the rows, the clatter on glass waking my napping boy
who stumbles to find me pacing linoleum, leans his
curly head into my leg as animals do, whimpers when
will it end? Of course it does, sky lightening first
southwest of here where often we can see what's next.
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Katrina Roberts is the author of four collections of poems. A graduate of Harvard University and the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, she's currently the Mina Schwabacher Professor of English and the Humanities at Whitman College, where she directs the Visiting Writers Reading Series. "Best" was published in her 2008 collection, Friendly Fire, which won an Idaho Prize for Poetry.
