As long as we're on poetry

One I keep in an obscure email file to find and read now and again. By Linda Bierds:

Osteogenesis Imperfecta
--Michel Petrucciani (1962-1998)

Picture a horse on a shallow path,

the thwick, thwick of its hooves in the grass.
This is the sound of the spine collapsing.

Not a pop, but a rasp, he would tell you,
Petrucciani. Evening, perhaps, a gloss
on piano keys, flute, the metronome's

serrated tip. And perhaps he would speak
of a sudden freeze, an orchard shadowed
by a dozen men, long aprons black-waxed
and flapping. Another place, another

century. Reaching deep in their leather sacks
they are casting water to the vivid limes,
their arms alive with the bow-strokes of cellists.
Then over the fruit an ice begins, dries
into glassy arcs. And over the ice,

the dark harp of thrush's song, and over
them all, the weather. And how perfect
the brindles of ice, he might say, curved like ribs
to those greening hearts. Perhaps he would shift
in his soft chair, weight too great on his glossy bones,

his slowly eroding frame, and ask you
to picture the orchard at dawn. One horse
at rest near the frozen path. Now the thwick, thwick
of apron flaps. Far off to the east,

the slow, equatorial rim of the season
widens. Imagine how fiercely they dip the cups,
the life of their arms, the falling,

how the horse's throat-deep, rhythmic sighs,
and the vapory mist of each dipper's breath

step forth, take their shapes, and are gone.