This is the land where he spent what were possibly the best, certainly the last, days of his life. He drank from the roughly y-shaped pond even in the summer when the neon green duckweed coated its murky surface, made lentil soup of it. His hooves sank in the silt printed with the three-pronged and webbed prints of the black-necked, white-cheeked Canadian geese that migrate here every year, the shiny mallard ducks and their brown-spotted ducklings. His grey hooves left pockets for pools of water to form, swimming with little black tadpoles, some with tiny feet emering from their tails. His steps, certainly, spooked frogs into jumping into the pond with only the gulp of the water to give them away.
This is the land he stood on during thunderstorms and tornado warnings, the thick black mud in the sloped paddock by the barn rich with manure, deeper than his fetlocks. He ate hay golden with heat from this ground, the steep hill of yellow-white sand leading from the paddock towards Old Orangeburg Road, the hill over which the sun set in the winter, endless sky melting to rainbow phosphorescence then blue-purple then night. Nowhere on earth could the sunset be more vibrant on cold November nights than right here in little Lexington, South Carolina, above my beloved's shaggy mane and slightly swayed back.
This land, crowded with pine forest and rough-cut trails worn by years of hooves kicking up dust on the same path to and from feeding each day, blanketed with brown pine needles, is the land he walked. The downed limbs and prickly pine cones weren't the obstacles for his grey hooves that they were for my flip-flopped feet and tender, naked white legs. The bushes he nudged through were home to writing spiders, large black and yellow female bodies which create zig-zagged webs, eat them at night, rebuild them each morning, bounce in them and make it look like hefty wind.
This earth swathes my first true love. He has been buried here since May 1st, 1998, and every year, I leave a bouquet of dead flowers and scatter dead petals on his unmarked, sandy grave. Even now, after all of the trees have been levelled and the horses await the planned fencing-in, I can still point out the exact rectangular patch of sunken ground which papooses his long-decayed remains, the exact dimensions of the place where every tear I've cried has watered him, fertilizer for the newly planted grass, even in this sea of horse graves.
