Wild Mare with Thunderstorm, Numbered List, and Rogue Sestina
Lisa Lewis
1. I wanted to keep her close and fast forever.
2. But I wanted to wear her down
3. so she would carry me to the fence, over and away.
4. I would guide
5. and she would learn.
6. I would not take her blood to test in a vial.
7. I would not enter her heart with weapons.
8. Once I worried about a shadow in her eye.
9. I worried about her neck straining over a fence for green grass.
10. She is tall, heavy, she could break rusted wire like the story of my longing to ride her.
11. She could but did not.
Our work took us through hours of circling and running away. A wind shudder in the trees could shift her sullen plodding to leaps. I dodged, I gravitated, the center held me like a fist with my head stuck out.
I fell and she rose. She never fell. Her small eye surveyed me like a clock. A snake crept from the pile of scrap metal near our paralyzed roundabout.
This was a private pastime, step befalling step. The sun soared anyway, bored.
Anyone could guess the end of this story, but it hasn’t ended. Bored in our circle, I predict what glows ahead like the falseness we find shearing away when we seek the natural. Certain I’m right, I keep us both round about, occupied, I think, around and around. Around the dust, the living leaps eternal. I remember the humility of counting strides, observing the clock face of earth where each pared hoof entered the track in its space, then out.
Humility, rightness, proven otherwise. One night a thunderstorm tears out of a broken sky. She needs her blanket, I can’t catch her, she’s soon bored with my missed efforts and gallops past me in mud, outrunning the clock. Why not release her into the lightning where she wants to be, tearing away? I get close enough to pitch the blanket over her neck at the moment she leaps. It blinds her and she fights like the hero she is. This part of the test is about us both, her beating the barn like a mallet with her body, me screaming about her stopping, me stopping, till the hammering dies down. Water streams out the gutters, down my face, her brown hide, I look past where she still leaps to the unmown fields, dirt road, more animals grazing in their tame way, bored. My house warms itself with error. The windows cake over and fear bleeds away. Alone except for her, like always, I watch her run down like an unwound clock.
1. The mare who is larger than her own story ticks in her hooves like a clock.
2. She casts the world around her into chaos, a sour song about 3. the will to move in opposition. I step in her direction, she backs away 4. with more force than I can match, she is round dark storm and I am out 5. in the rain in the middle of a circle I can’t leave without her, bored 6. with her, with myself, with the pounding rain, with her crooked leaps.
An eternity of round, round like a storm, round like wind, a tornado of leaps, round like the bottom of a barrel, round like a rolling eye, a stopped clock, a stopped horse race, a failed lesson, a bit spat out, a bad student bored with her teacher, a teacher dizzy with watching the circle, its roundabout that spins like a living mare at the end of a rope she could any minute tear out of my hands, tear my living hands, skin and bone in ribbons, ripped away.