Friday, January 28, 2011
If I had not fallen from my horse
If I had not fallen from my horse
she might never have licked my face
hay on her breath
ice through my back
a shout to the hearse
at the edge of the pond
go home our tongues are on fire
Note:
the mere fragment of a day blessed by silence,
gray hat-adorned, solitude resounding to the touch,
rejoicing in the light on winter graves
Another note:
Have been reading, the past two days, Whitman’s Leaves of Grass in the original 1855 edition. Everyone should, but at the right time. And when is the right time? When you remember, for the first or thousandth time, that even you, in your pleasure and health and grief and woe, might not survive the day.
Update:
“If I had not fallen from my horse” added to Poems, Slightly Used.
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11 comments:
How goes that saying .....
get right back in saddle on that horse which trowed you off....or something like that,can not remember ....there is no "right"time for Whitman,time is right always for Whitman.....
beautifully done William!
cheers!
Oh,and I love that another note of yours!!:)
Thank you! Such are the perils, I guess, of riding bareback....
Survival depends, I sense, upon what ones' definition of death may be? "Mind as the universal basis of experience — the creator of happiness and of suffering, the creator of what we call life and what we call death."
I haven't been with horses for years - I miss them. I loved kissing their noses - they smelled sweet, like oats, and soft like chamois leather.
Nice poem. Strong visual.
or perils(whatever that means)of reading bareback....:D
the great quest, to live like this and the irony, to give up the work, to arrive in the place where one can never arrive:) (for me, anyway, the work and such - for you, it seems, a state of grace)
such a beautiful poem, if every letter in the word beautiful could be a dessert, and spaces between them be acceptance.
Oh my, on reading Whitman's Leaves of Grass~
xo
erin
Thank you, Donna. Other than in dreams and poems, I’ve been on a horse exactly once in my life, and it was many years ago. His name, oddly enough, was Willie. As for definitions, in this case, a very simple one will do: the heart stops beating and the hearse makes a u-turn.
“perils,” in this sense, Aleksandra, means dangers.
Erin, yesterday the distance between morning and evening was so vast I think there might have been stars in my saddlebag, if I had had one, instead of the dust that’s in there now, along with an unread bible and two old suits.
At the risk of sounding punningly pedestrian, a writer is only as good as his horse--but you, my man, seem to have been blessed with a stallion called Pegasus.
And yet many are they, brother,
in their neigh-saying ways,
who will say this fool
is better suited
to Rocinante.
And quite right they will be.
Oh , just beautiful.
Perfect.
Thank you, Isabelle. If it’s so, then perhaps it’s because everything is.
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