I very much enjoyed the dreamscape this inspired for me. “Hung over a staircase under which we play-pretend” the vivid imagination created after seeing something as magnificent as a horse in motion. I can only imagine the awe seeing a life size painting such as this as a child. Beautiful write. H🌷
Your poem, from it's opening images, haunts me, holds the fragility and wonder of childhood for me in a way that I seldom encounter, a very small door, long closed, opening into a vast, forgotten landscape.
When I was younger, before age and all the violence of living brought so much pain that troubles my sleep, I used to lucid dream. I would stand upon a roiling sea and pull lighting bolts from the sky, and each made the most exquisite celestial music. I would be pulled into the energetic orbit of a jovian gas giant, stretched thin by it's gravity well, or lurk amidst chunks of stone in the Kuiper belt as I beheld a sea of glittering ice crystals, surrounding a lonely blue pulsar, like a lighthouse in all that colour and darkness, searching the star ocean. I haven't dreamt like that in a long time, but your poem helps my heart to remember, what my mind recalls only in opaque dimensions. It is a treasure, to me.
The intimate details of this catch the breath. It is an honor to peruse you Andrew.