Elegy With A Bridle In Its Hand

One was a bay cowhorse from Piedra & the other was a washed out palomino

And both stood at the rail of the corral & both went on aging

In each effortless tail swish, the flies rising, then congregating again

Around their eyes & muzzles & withers.

Their front teeth were by now as yellow as antique piano keys & slanted to the angle

Of shingles on the maze of sheds & barn around them; their puckered

Chins were round & black as frostbitten oranges hanging unpicked from the limbs

Of trees all through winter like a comment of winter itself on everything

That led to it & found gradually the way out again.

In the slowness of time.  Black time to white, & rind to blossom.

Deity is in the details & we are details among other details & we long to be

Teased out of ourselves.  And become all of them.

The bay had worms once & had acquired the habit of drinking orange soda

From an uptilted bottle & nibbling cookies from the flat of a hand, & like to do

Nothing else now, & the palomino liked to do nothing but gaze off

At traffic going past on the road beyond vineyards & it would follow each car

With a slight turning of its neck, back & forth, as if it were a thing

Of great interest to him.

If I rode them, the palomino would stumble & wheeze when it broke

Into a trot & would relapse into a walk after a second or two & then stop

Completely & without cause; the bay would keep going though it creaked

Underneath me like a rocking chair of dry, frail wood, & when I knew it could no longer

Continue but did so anyway, or when the palomino would stop & then take

Only a step or two when I nudged it forward again, I would slip off either one of them,

Riding bareback, & walk them slowly back, letting them pause when they wanted to.

At dawn in winter sometimes there would be a pane of black ice covering

The surface of the water trough & they would nudge it with their noses or muzzles,

And stare at it as if they were capable of wonder or bewilderment.

They were worthless.  They were the motionless dusk & the motionless

Moonlight, & in the moonlight they were other worlds.  Worlds uninhabited

And without visitors.  Worlds that would cock an ear a moment

When the migrant workers come back at night to the sheds they were housed in

And turn a radio on, but only for a moment before going back to whatever

Wordless & tuneless preoccupation involved them.

The palomino was called Misfit & the bay was named Querido Flacco,

And the names of some of the other shapes had been Rockabye

And Ojo Pendejo & Cue Ball & Back Door Peter & Frenchfry & Sandman

And Rolling Ghost & Anastasia.

Death would come for both of them with its bridle of clear water in hand

And they would not look up from grazing on some patch of dry grass or even

Acknowledge it much; & for a while I began to think that the world

Rested on a limitless ossuary of horses where their bones & skulls stretched

And fused until only the skeleton of one enormous horse underlay

The smoke of cities & the cold branches of trees & the distant

Whine of traffic on the interstate.

If I & by implication therefore anyone looked at them long enough at dusk

Or in moonlight he would know the idea of heaven & of life everlasting

Was so much blown straw or momentary confetti

At the unhappy wedding of a sister.

Heaven was neither the light nor was it the air, & if it took a physical form

It was splintered lumber no one could build anything with.

Heaven was a weight behind the eyes & one would have to stare right through it

Until he saw the air itself, just air, the clarity that took the shackles from his eyes

And the taste of the bit from his mouth & knocked the rider off his back

So he could walk for once in his life.

Or just stand there for a moment before he became something else, some

Flyspeck on the wall of a passing & uninteruptible history whose sounds claimed

To be a cheering from bleachers but were actually no more than the noise

Of cars entering the mouths of a tunnel.

And in the years that followed he would watch them in the backstretch or the far turn

At Santa Anita or Del Mar.  Watch the way they made it all seem effortless,

Watch the way they were explosive & untiring.

And then watch the sun fail him again & slip from the world, & watch

The stands slowly empty.  As if all moments came back to this one, inexplicably

To this one out of all he might have chosen-Heaven with ashes in its hair

And filling what were once its eyes-this one with its torn tickets

Littering the aisles & the soft racket the wind made.  This one.  Which was his.

And if the voice of a broken king were to come in the dusk & whisper

To the world, that grandstand with its thousands of empty seats,

Who among the numberless you have become desires this moment

Which comprehends nothing more than loss & fragility & the fleeing of flesh?

He would have to look up at the quickening dark & say: Me.  I do.  It's mine.