Stephen Mead

Here is the remembered vision glimpsed:

Asleep - really - was I?

Having lived that landscape, the pasture's exquisite emerald

& of Devon dampness, the horizon's aura of pear-like ochre...

An Easter, slightly muddied, was the emotion,

with one chalk-white band of some road going through.

You were bareback, shirtless colt-black in that span

time swept into slumber's recurrence.

I wake from sudden shouts, rumbling dust of hooves

at a gallop, & one clear shot ringing on.

Were you cavalry?  Were you outlaw?

In my nose there is sulfur & smoke in my throat,

but gun powder fades first red, then pink,

courage the badge bleeding in this watercolor

sutured by my hair to your chest,

conscious now, a later age, 

where even in advancing daylight,

the wound itself no longer bleeds.