The Case Against Fear

A poem about us and about horses.

Hysteria is plotted neatly by the doctor’s
black lines, interconnected, tidy,
the outline of your uterus.
But fear doesn’t graph straight inside the skin.
Alarm goes rogue when it hits blood,
blossoming like a tree of life,
white-hot, burning, a raw assemblage of
nerve endings resurrected by a thought.