How the light gives us shape and tears at us.
This Polaroid ruined, streaked by stray rays and snow.
Or perfected: your one eye a coal, the other a star.
The horse’s fence a brushstroke of white, a blaze. Scarring his face.
The exposure doubles: two horses, four, beside you.
Your hands everywhere on the animal, your face unresolved.
Too many poses to reconcile.
Too many angles to consider from a single point in space.
Snow blindness is like that, a buildup of glare from all sides.
And the packed ice under us, which keeps nothing.
Or like the smallest particles that stream from the sun.
They run us through and through, touching no part of us.
T. J. McLemore’s poems, reviews, and interviews have appeared in Massachusetts Review, Adroit Journal, Michigan Quarterly Review, Kenyon Review, Crazyhorse, Poetry Daily, and other journals. He is the recipient of a Tennessee Williams Scholarship, the Richard Peterson Poetry Prize, and a Pushcart Prize nomination.