Horses in the Dust

April winds lift dust from my gravel road and carry it across the honey-colored prairie grass.  As I watch, the dust forms what might easily be mistaken for two ghost horses galloping away.  The horses rapidly fade and then vanish as wisps when they stir against a juniper and sage hillside.

For two nights in a row I have dreamed floods and my wife alive again.  I have never been insightful enough to assign meaning to dreams.  I am a dullard while sleeping and little better awake.  So far as horses, I have never fully taken to the real thing.   They are pretty and exquisitely muscular but tend to run from me, as if I were an upright form of disease.

I dream of water but wake to horses in the dust. 

“April,” wrote T. S. Eliot in his poem The Waste Land, “is the cruellest month, breeding lilacs out of dead land, stirring dull roots with spring rain.”

--Mitchell Hegman