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ANGELA ROCKEL
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Water horses
Last night five
horses
waded up out of the lake
–
and now I need to tell you
the gleam of their eyes,
the bright husks of their
hooves,
their shuddering coats
–
that one, russet shading tan
below
the black, soft, coarse,
upstanding brush of her mane,
and her sisters –
dapple, roan, chestnut, grey,
breathing beside her.
They stepped close into the
weeds,
cropping there in their halo
of insects,
wind-stirred grass become
ripple of flesh,
and I called out for their
beauty
though they say we should
fear them.
Back in the grip of the ice
we painted horses like this
shouldering out of the
rockface
into the lights of our
little fires,
the packed weight of the
unnamed world
massed as shadow behind
them.
It wasn’t the hunt we
were painting
(our middens full of the
bones of deer, rabbit, fowl),
it was our longing – we
crawled down
into the dark of our hope
and we waited there
to meet the warm gods
who came surging through
to call our first words from
us,
to lend their shapes to the
patterns
our nervy souls were laying
down.
When did we start to think
we could own them,
keep them in daylight, have
them
without that humble watch
through absolute night?
We lost them then –
clever,
they turned our grasp
against us,
bound our skin to clinging
hide
and dragged us down to a
different dark –
airless reach of a
waterworld.
There in the ooze they
unmade us,
took back the power of names
they’d given to bring
the worlds together.
By the lake – not
far from here –
we were trying to sing,
parts unlearned or snarled,
when the horses came.
And still, again last night
a praise-song came with
them,
stepping high out of the
cave of my mouth –
for the holy guests
returning and
the black water, behovely,
answering
in the play of voices,
in the darkening chambers.
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