Heartstrings : Reboot

Tuesday, August 7, 2012

Reboot

I've been quiet here because there has been too much to say...the paradox of blogging.

I have had my new mare for a month now, and unfortunately not a lot of good came out of that month. She got injured, I got scared. The happy ending, or happy beginning, is that I have moved her back to her old barn and last night, I rode her for the first time since July 6th.

I should have kept her there all along, but don't we all wish we could turn back time and make better choices, choices that can only be clear in hindsight?

More changes are on the horizon, and it's this wish for x-ray vision into the future and the shadow of the unknown that is making me hesitant to commit to any one thing.

But amid the spin of all the options and the circumstances that I ride the wave of, some pieces seem to be settling into pattern like multicolor shards in a kaleidoscope. The simple heart of the matter is:

Last night I pushed back all the reasons not to, and got back on my new horse.

We only walked. We're still figuring each other out. We are finding our way back to the place we started, where we didn't have a good history or a bad history, but no history. We will walk as slowly as we need to onto a clean page.

After I took her saddle off I stood facing her and wrapped my arms over the top of her neck. She lowered her head and pressed her forehead into my chest. We both sighed. We both promised to try.

5 comments:

Calm, Forward, StraightAugust 7, 2012 at 3:47 PM
Making that connection to a new horse is not always easy. I imagine it is especially hard when you have had the kind of partnership that you and Coro have. It will happen... :D
ReplyDelete
Replies
KateAugust 7, 2012 at 5:49 PM
I'm so happy for you. Now you can build more positivity off of last night's ride and go from there...baby steps :)
ReplyDelete
Replies
TerryAugust 7, 2012 at 7:06 PM
Thank you for the update. I wondered how it was going with your new mare, but I figured you'd share when you were ready. I hope this is the first of many happy rides.
ReplyDelete
Replies
ValAugust 8, 2012 at 5:04 AM
You will get there!
ReplyDelete
Replies
AnonymousAugust 8, 2012 at 5:41 AM
A rocky start just gives the two of you fond memories a decade or two from now... I remain a giant fan of this lovely mare, and I know you are up to the task. Things are real now, and that is a good place to be. Yay.
ReplyDelete
Replies

Add comment

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.