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Plato's Bad Horse
LULU AND JACK after G.W. Pabst’s Pandora’s Box Things are dear on the eve of departure. You sit in my lap and we watch the candle you lit, keeping vigil over the remains of the stale bread. We left our shadows in the stairwell like great overcoats, fit for giants. They were clumsy loiterers, out of breath by the first landing where I slid my knife over the banister because I didn’t want to hurt you— half-seal in your black dress, half-hummingbird. Here, another woman gave me a gift for you. A twig of mistletoe grey as her eyes. She was an odd sort of thief, paying back for the look she stole, and I was like a river, unable to refuse, fearing the skipped stone of each glance. It rode light as a feather in my waistcoat, but it has a burr’s cling, the smell of outdoors. We could kiss beneath it, and wake up in the middle of the woods. PLATO'S BAD HORSE I wanted Plato's bad horse, not the good one, set on discourse and decorum. I wanted the horse that pulls toward the radiant face of the beloved. He takes the bit shamelessly: a great jumble of a beast, thick-necked, bleary-eyed. He is, we are expressly told, the mate of insolence and knavery. The good horse, upright and clean-limbed, boasts an aquiline nose, a milk-white eye. He will drench the soul in penitential sweat, take the teeth out of intemperate desire. But Plato's bad horse is part scapegoat and part ox. (I'd seen oxen tremble in unison, and then, bellies to the earth like improbable mice, creep forward in a liquid movement that unseated marble slabs.) Only after much bit-yanking and plying of the whip, will the sight of the beloved bring the bad horse to his knees. * One off-season, my mother stabled two horses: they were both bad, and consequently, drew the phantom chariot of their desires evenly over the field, the Indian paintbrush, the half-rusted fern announcing the stone wall that ran beside the woods. She herself had become misshapen with desire: she wanted to keep living, like the roans- She found delicate work for the fingers along their parsed necks, little stopping places, elaborate as the fretwork of a flute, that maintained in her the ability to dwell... And this is how my mother left me, her hands offering solace to those difficult beasts whose existence slipped my mind even before they were dispatched to parts unknown. My memories have become too blurred to be of use, like horses that cannot be ridden. Like my mother's roans pulling in tandem to join the halves of what I still don't know. › Order Books |
