​Horse Latitudes

In horse latitudes sailors once lashed
   the flanks of stallions, mares, until
      those wild-eyed, gentle beasts plunged overboard,
 
cleaved the still surface, water churning
   grey froth on their muzzles while trumpets
      of brash neighs turned to whinnies, turned
 
to what they’d say was nothing more
   than a sudden breeze which filled sails,
      pushed the ship, water lifting in an eerie
 
swell like the cold silk of your marriage bed,
   unnatural white, and you weren’t even innocent
      though you tried to be until he pressed his mouth
 
to yours and you snaked your tongue between
   his teeth so you both knew but didn’t care.
      After twenty-five years, you say, even passion,
 
that universal desire, that voracious brat,
   grows lean, simple.  You learned to go farther
      on less and less while your fingers grew slender,
 
then ugly, slack, and your rings slipped
   over bone, meaning one and one and one makes one,
      and you tried to make it back to the beginning
 
of your past when he was a stranger, all arms
   and legs gone bronze with sun and you leaned
      in the window so he could see your breasts,
 
how they were shaped like his cupped palms,
   and he gave you his ring which you let dangle
      at the center of that fleshy parabola.  But
 
there was a past before that past, someone
   who had a name only he remembers and when you ask
      he shrugs and drifts off toward another night
 
pissing beer downtown on the backstreets
   in front of whores who stamp their feet
      against the cold, and anyway, to say that name
 
would be nothing more than the ruined music
   of this wind chime, its crystals snapped
      to jagged teeth in last autumn’s last storm
 
so it thunks its flat voice, a sound which is
   no longer a song.  Or it is.  The way this wind
      wraps around my bones, bites salty, cold, and I too
 
am thinking, one, though I want you to know,
   goddammit, I’ve always loved you but couldn’t
      say it because that music is impossible,
 
ruined, and we’re like those horses, really,
   mad with fright, their deep lungs singed
      with brine.  They must have taken comfort
 
in mutual loss, corded necks jutting
   from that flat field of North Atlantic
      as if they were merely chest deep in prairie
 
grass.  And maybe it’s useless to believe
   in forever; maybe I’m wrong to think any poem
      will let me get it right, how your hair,
 
just now, long and coarse as a wild mare’s mane,
   is frayed by wind, utterly beautiful, restless,
      as it shifts north, northwest.