The Rescue

The Rescue


by Robert Creeley


The man sits in a timelessness
with the horse under him in time
to a movement of legs and hooves
upon a timeless sand.


Distance comes in from the foreground
present in the picture as time
he reads outward from
and comes from that beginning.


A wind blows in
and out and all about the man
as the horse ran
and runs to come in time.


A house is burning in the sand.
A man and horse are burning.
The wind is burning.
They are running to arrive.



Robert Creeley, “The Rescue” from Selected Poems of Robert Creeley. Copyright © 1991 by the Regents of the University of California. Reprinted with the permission of the University of California Press, www.ucpress.edu.