Somewhere in Kentucky

A murmuration rises sideways over my car,
a pitiless wave of starlings rolling in endless

copies over the highway, the sky, the telephone lines.
Insanity is measured by how many times one does
the same thing expecting different results.

My sanity depends on a horse
steaming in sulfur-yellow God light at dawn.

I'm driving with Dostoevsky on the tape deck.
Let the world go to hell, but I should always have
tea-colored wings casting shadows over fields of cut wheat.

This is mercy like a small tray of grain for a sparrow in winter.
Tires on the tar-sealed road frighten the horse
and the starlings scatter.