Heartstrings : May 2013

Wednesday, May 15, 2013

Changing Seasons

It isn't all hearts and flowers...

The difficulty of public blogging is self-censorship, of wanting to paint a certain picture or write a certain story. This has been "The Best Of," but there have been unseen sorrows and fears. Many tears have been shed between these lines.

Things don't always go according to our hopes and dreams. I could write a novel on the thought process that has gone into the journey of this past year, but the Tall Bay and I have come to the fork in our road and I have made the decision to sell her.

I think in a way we are too similar - both over-thinkers, worriers - and we amplify this trait in each other. We spent some time apart and we both became happier. There was a heaviness I was carrying around that doesn't belong to the thing that usually brings you joy.

I rode a horse in Spain that told me, as horses will, all I had not been saying. From the ever-smaller circle of my comfort zone with my own horse, I cantered a strange horse in a field of wildflowers while an unruly boxer cavorted underfoot. Mundo showed me the world. He said "remember this?"

I have spent so much time in my head, and talking to others (most from the outside were not surprised which was a humbling perspective) that I hardly know what to say here.

I don't know what this will mean for my future with horses and for this blog. At the heart of it, from the beginning, was Coro, and perhaps his stature leaves no vacancy. Our activities are limited these days - he is now 24, with a Grade 3 heart murmur and enjoying his retirement.

Last weekend I carried a brush and a bridle out to his pasture and hopped on in jeans and a helmet, sans bareback pad. Notchee followed us as we wandered across the sun-warmed field. At that moment, it seemed like enough.

Selling a horse is foreign to me. I'm caring for mine and my mother's that we have had for twenty years...but the Tall Bay's arc is just starting. I watch her like a grand caravan just out of reach.

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.

Tuesday, May 21, 2013

What We're Doing These Days

Wednesday, May 15, 2013

Changing Seasons