The horses sleep lying down, legs twitching, mouths wrapped around blades of grass. The flies are attracted to their moist, flickering eyes. I'm as close as I can focus, examining their faces, tails, hooves and bellies, bewitched by the sensuality of horse and place. I am in a meadow high in the Sierra Nevada. Channels of the San Joaquin River braid through the thick, lush grass. I take off my shoes and socks, roll up my pants and wade through the shallow water to where the horses are now eating. They trace a pattern, mysterious to me, around and around the meadow, eating, drinking and sleeping.

In the mid-1990s, searching for an alternative view of the world, I came upon the horses, and was reminded of a line of a poem by Edwin Muir, The Horses, “Dropped in some wilderness of the broken world, Yet new as if come from their own Eden.”

Megalith-Still was published by Stanley/Barker in 2022.