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. |