Erasure

Brindled, where what's left of the light finds him, he cowers 
in front of me: one way, as I remember it, that a body 
having grown accustomed to receiving punishment expresses 
 
receipt, or a readiness for it, or—wild, bewildered—the desire to. 
 
Above us, the usual branches lift unprophetically or not, depending: 
now spears; now arrows. There's a kind of tenderness that makes 
more tender 
 
        all it touches. There's a need that ruins. Dark. The horse 
comes closer. A smell to him like that of the earth when it's been 
too long dry, drought-long, and the rain just starting, that first release, up, 
that the earth gives up like a name meant to be kept secret, or as when 
the memory of rescue has displaced the chance of it, unlooked-for, into 
 
clearer view: like that exactly: oh he smells like the sweet wet earth, itself.