Imagine your hand. Imagine your hand is a horse. A coal black Friesian drinking sunlight from a stream beginning mountain leaps alongside fiddleneck ferns and boggy rush seeps. Imagine the mountains held in place by the hands of glaciers. Imagine the horse drinking from the glacier melting. Imagine the glacier drinking from the sun. The sun on your hand on your horse. The sun imagining a horse gold and molten leaping through time. The horse imagining your hand a carrot. The carrot imagining its cold bones in your mouth. Imagine your mouth is a sun healing your lover every time it shines. Imagine your hand is a mouth. Imagine a kiss. Imagine the horse with the sun in your mouth warming soil so carrots grow below the melting glacier. The glacier kissing carrots reaching for the sun. Your hand clutching ferns and reaching for the horse. The horse reaching for the carrot. The horse reaching for your hand. The horse reaching for the sun reaching for your lover reaching for time.
Michael Rogner is a restoration ecologist, self-taught poet, and husband battling stage IV cancer. His work appears or is forthcoming in Willow Springs, Minnesota Review, Crab Creek Review, Barrow Street, Moon City Review, and elsewhere.
