A TIP OF THE WHIP

Once, when hunting for lady
slippers, I came upon a horse standing
in the woods. Behind her rump,
a shed emerged as though a tattered book
had been pulled from a library shelf.
So did milk bottles strung like plastic skulls
on the barbed wire fence I almost walked into,
fence like a crown of thorns.

I wanted to stumble back
into the bliss solitude blesses,
but the horse stamped the ground
with hooves so overgrown ripples
had formed like fungi on a log.
The air she snorted was a sticky haze,
a medieval hood meshed with black flies.

Elsewhere, the few lady slippers
deemed to blossom in the dark garden
of the woods tossed their pink flames
off the sides of earth, but here
the mare mixed the underworld
of her world with mine.

In it, a whip was stinging her flanks
while she reared, a huge primadonna
of darkness. The fields lay down stalks
of whitened glrasses, the moon circled
with its sultry head held low. Still
the whip cross-hatched her back,
her hooves hooked and unhooked
empty mouths of air.

I called her name, the name
of the man tiring the whip,
the name of my mother, her mother
the name I wished to be called by,
the name of my desire.

Still the whip flew and flew,
the sick maple dropped its dwarved leaves
and I forgot summer, the specks
of wild strawberries bleeding
in the yard, how the bridal light
which hooded the fields each dawn
veiled loveliness from horror, damage
from danger, past from present

until one tense hovered over the earth:
this animal on its hind legs, froth
blooming from her mouth like sea foam,
her eyes drawn back into her head.
its pictograph growing flowerless
on the stone of her skull.

It ended so swiftly. The lady slippers
delicately stepping over ferns, exiting
the pink inferno of their capacious innocence.
The agitated horse, the whip
finally withdrawn like a dark
penetrating nerve back into the hand
that feeds. Suddenly al old mare

nosing a nest of green hay stood
before me, flicking the black mail of flies
off her back. She was busy eating,
stuffing the factory of the mouth
with the swish of hay, the crunch
of her teeth like watery gravel.

As a child, I ate dirt, sand,
the ornamental grasses lining fancy beds
as if each frond would form a Chinese character
deep in my soul, a picture
of a language I could understand.
If I dreamed enough, I could eat
spider legs, the cobalt blue damselflies,
the black licorice heads of Jack-in-the-pulpit,
purple violets, sweet as candy hearts.

Now I tasted salt on the palm of my hands.
I let the horse drag her tongue up my arm,
nibble at my blouse. Back at the house,
my husband lay upon the kingdom
of the bed, the floor littered
with lacewings encased in dust.
Foxglove, in an old carafe,
dropped small silken bells, soft
as in infant’s head.

The horse’s breath was deep, sonorous
as though piloting out of sleep—once
under sky the color of black pearls,
the man I would come to marry
kissed me with such delicacy
it stung me. A tip-of-the-whip
kiss—could I sacrifice pain

for this? Could the snow currying
the woods outside the door, leave
its message, its shimmering veils
and heavy presumptions like a sedative
the past could take and drowse through?

The mare flinched under my velvet touch.
Scraps of her were missing.
Little squares of hide, small
as the territory lady slippers root in,
those pink wounds which when opened
must die to close. I would happen
upon them years later, on Cross Point Road,
living as though June were a tongue
upon them, tasting the undersides,
their deep, veined pink.

The two plants constituted a colony.
Beneath them, the Swampscott River
carried its lace of light inland,
then back to sea again, it was a song
to them, a ditty they might remember
if their time to blossom hadn’t been
so brief.

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Copyright, Elizabeth Kirschner.
All rights reserved by author.