Heartstrings : A New Chapter

Thursday, August 9, 2012

A New Chapter

Last night I rode my new horse again at my new barn (her old barn).

There was one person riding a paint while I was tacking up but we ended up with the arena to ourselves.

My first unsupervised ride on her since before her injury. She was relaxed and listening.

We trotted! That active, rhythmic trot which won me over. I called her Dandywine and Leonine and I swear she was admiring herself in the mirrors...maybe we both were a little. She even offered to canter, but not yet. Though she is sound, that leg is still tender. My confidence is still tender. We are in no hurry.

We did transitions with breath alone, as my trainer recently taught me. Breathe in: trot. Breathe out: walk. Exhale again: halt. She responds beautifully to this. It is amazing.

She looks so enormous when I'm standing next to her, but mounted she feels right.

Afterward she followed me while I picked up the mess she had made (mare's metabolism works wonderfully) and I soaked in the clean, organized atmosphere and routine of the place. My name on her stall card. Her turnout companion waiting for her when she got back to her stall so he can continue his adoring uninterrupted gaze through the stall divider. A little hay left in her corner feeder.

As I was untacking her I realized...

This all happened so quickly and not the way anyone would have hoped, but there I was...riding my big bay dressage prospect in a dressage barn. Putting all my things in their place and currying the sweat from a tall mare's back. My tall mare.

The recent chaos has kind of overshadowed the glimmer of a dream coming true. It's all still rather unreal.

I gave her two little peppermint treats and closed her outer stall door. She lives at "E" along the indoor arena. The sun set a gentle pink as I walked to my car. It was a good night.

2 comments:

ValAugust 10, 2012 at 4:21 AM
Congrats on a great ride together.
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AnonymousAugust 11, 2012 at 6:16 PM
Lovely post .... I look forward to hearing much more about Dani, beginnings are so tentative and precious - you've got all the good stuff ahead of you! I often find it hard to access blogspot comments, nonetheless, I am following and supporting!
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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.