Watching from afar, horses jump
with what I would call grace,
but it’s more than that word
could possibly afford
the kind of beauty that could
stop gravity for whole seconds,
granting a thousand pounds
freedom to glide through the air
and land as light as a blossom
released from a locust tree in May.
If I were French, I’d say grace
however you say grace in French.
Perhaps, that would capture it.
But such beauty shouldn’t be contained,
and my French is limited to words,
like cheval and jument, and equally
ill-equipped at describing their elegance.
I’ve resigned myself to settle for grace
until I move close enough to find grace
dissipate under the cacophonous
thunder of powerful hooves
meeting loose sand compacted the way
only a hurdling beast can.
Once all the grace has gone away,
I find its accurate antonym
just as absent from my vernacular
and wonder where I might discover
such a brutal word to describe
not mere grace but its destruction.
I settle on somewhere decisively
unromantic, perhaps Germanic.

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Deron Eckert is a poet and writer who lives in Lexington, Kentucky. His work has appeared in Rattle, Strange Horizons, Stanchion, Beaver Magazine, Door is a Jar, Ghost City Review, Maudlin House, The Fourth River, and elsewhere. He can be found on Instagram at deroneckert and Twitter @DeronEckert.