Heartstrings : A Dark Jewel

Wednesday, June 6, 2012

A Dark Jewel

I want to take a moment to memorialize a very special horse who was lost yesterday.

Desdemona was a young Canadian school horse at a barn I worked at over ten years ago, a horse with a gentle enough soul to carry kids around as a 3-year-old. I took her on as my special project, wanting to preserve her extraordinary nature by sparing her being pulled and bounced on all day. Missing that incomparable relationship with one horse, weary of hopping on something different constantly, Desi gave me that stability and the feeling of a horse that was mine during my time there.

I have ridden probably close to one hundred horses in my life, and while they each had something to offer and teach, few have touched my heart like that mare. Only a handful would I have liked to have as my own, and while it wasn't a possibility at the time, I would have bought Desi in a heartbeat.

She was a dark bay mare with a star and a lovely strip, an elongated triangle with the point toward her nose. She had a delicate face and a refined build. She was one of the kindest horses I have ever met, her generosity astonished me on so many occasions.

One day when I was clipping her, I nicked the edge of her sweet ear, drawing a spot of blood. I felt terrible, and rather than pulling away, she angelically lowered her head to let me try again. I promised to do better. I started her over fences and early on she took a bad stumble on landing and fell to her knees; I barely managed to stay on. We took the jump again, and despite the scare she offered no hesitation. She was that kind of horse.

In the deep of winter when I would have evening lessons I would take her from her stall, scrape the icicles off her belly and sit on her in the arena to stay warm.

My favorite memory of her is getting to take her out on a conditioning ride with two other trainers on a couple of fancy imported warmbloods. We took the horses to the polo fields and let them open up into a true gallop - the last time I have done so. She didn't have to be asked twice - we flew over the earth and the velocity made my eyes water as I leaned over Desdemona's neck, her black mane whipping against my face. She was pure speed and freedom; I trusted her completely. While the warmbloods stayed keyed up for the rest of the ride, Desdemona came back to a peaceful walk.

I started dressage work with her and when I said goodbye we rode a quiet test in the outdoor arena, a precious, reverent ride I knew would be our last. She was perfect and giving, as ever.

I was overjoyed when I learned later that a mother and daughter who were among my favorite students had bought Desdemona. I couldn't have imagined a better match for a horse so deserving of her own people. I am so deeply saddened for their loss.

Thank you, Desdemona, for your beauty and grace. You will never be forgotten.

1 comment:

DomJune 6, 2012 at 5:40 PM
She sounds amazing. RIP.
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Poetry Corner

Source
by Mark Doty

I'd been traveling all day, driving north
—smaller and smaller roads, clapboard houses
startled awake by the new green around them—

when I saw three horses in a fenced field
by the narrow highway's edge: white horses,

two uniformly snowy, the other speckled
as though he'd been rolling in flakes of rust.
They were of graduated sizes—small, medium,

large—and two stood to watch while the smallest
waded up to his knees in a shallow pond,

tossing his head and taking
—it seemed unmistakable—
delight in the cool water

around his hooves and ankles.
I kept on driving, I went into town

to visit the bookstores and the coffee bar
and looked at the new novels
and the volumes of poetry, but all the time

it was horses I was thinking of,
and when I drove back to find them,

the three companions left off
whatever it was they were playing at
and came nearer the wire fence—

I'd pulled over onto the grassy shoulder
of the highway—to see what I'd brought them.

Experience is an intact fruit,
core and flesh and rind of it; once cut open,
entered, it can't be the same, can it?

Though that is the dream of the poem:
as if we could look out

through that moment's blushed skin.
They wandered toward the fence.
The tallest turned toward me;

I was moved by the verticality of her face,
elongated reach from the tips of her ears

down to white eyelids and lashes,
the pink articulation
of nostrils, wind stirring the strands

of her mane a little to frame the gaze
in which she fixed me. She was the bold one;

the others stood at a slight distance
while she held me in her attention.
Put your tongue to the green-flecked peel

of it, reader, and taste it
from the inside: would you believe me
if I said that beneath them a clear channel

ran from the three horses to the place
they'd come from, the cool womb

of nothing, cave at the heart
of the world, deep and resilient and firmly set
at the core of things? Not emptiness,

not negation, but a generous, cold nothing:
the breathing space out of which new shoots

are propelled to the grazing mouths,
out of which the horses themselves are tendered
into the new light. The poem wants the impossible;

the poem wants a name for the kind nothing
at the core of time, out of which the foals

come tumbling: curled, fetal, dreaming,
and into which the old crumple, fetlock
and skull breaking like waves of foaming milk....

Cold, bracing nothing that mothers forth
mud and mint, hoof and clover, root hair

and horsehair and the accordion bones
of the rust-spotted little one unfolding itself
into the afternoon. You too: you flare

and fall back into the necessary
open space. What could be better than that?

It was the beginning of May,
the black earth nearly steaming,
and a scatter of petals decked the mud

like pearls, everything warm with setting out,
and you could see beneath their hooves
the path they'd traveled up, the horse road

on which they trot into the world, eager for pleasure
and sunlight, and down which they descend,

in good time, into the source of spring.