Monuments

After the poet Deborah Digges

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Photo by Katrina Hays

(draft)

More than the decades I’ve spent sitting across
from men and women gifted in the arts
of conversation, inquiry, and the acronymed
methods of mental healing which ever
point towards the sort of internal spelunking
I happen to be rather good at—

more than the inevitable flood tides
of emotion that meant my phalanges
curled tightly towards palms,
creating war clubs used to batter blood past
the sane coherence of skin—
used to clobber
the object of my ire which was mostly myself,
but often-often-often an animal,
(an animal I said I loved)—

and more than the way I fled
the death created in childhood when
the pale gaze of the first man
looked past and through me and found what he saw
lacking some indescribable,
desperately needed thing,
and I watched and counted each drop
every afternoon when sour grape
called him like a lover,

those years when everything I believed was wrong
with me
coalesced into a monument to a lie,

a monument which for a very long time
I thought was made from the most beautiful white marble,
to be burnished and tended,
with comfort found in all the arrowslits,
the murder holes, the jagged and uneven
edges, and as I listened to the howl of voices around its corners
I believed in its song and as I licked and sucked and bit
those corners I thought aridity and a dusty tongue were goodness—

more than the decades of the above-mentioned naval-gazing
leading to the recognition that the monolith
I’d cradled and caressed
actually needed pulverizing
and I found it made not of the purest marble but rather
rusted rebar, cement, and gravel—

and more than the three black dogs who taught me
how to say I love you,
whose bodies still bore the brunt of my war clubs—

more than the books which lie broken-backed
in my home and
the words that unspool
in my wake like greasy fabric tatter—

and more even than the many waters
I’ve submerged myself in,
hoping to soften the outline of that monument,
which ever reformed no matter how much I broke—

I have been healed by a horse
whose shore I lie ebbed upon,
the mare whose legs are marbled gray.

She is the color of old concrete flecked with rust speckle.
She holds the dapple of Sierra granite in rain on her coat.
She is monumental in her presence
and I bow before her,
finding wonder in every tendon.

My open hand slips the sheath of her thin skin,
feels abutments of calcaneus and metatarsus;
fingers trail the long cannon bone
to bump the cartilaginous hill of fetlock;
touch whispers the slope of pastern until
palm arrives at the curved rock of a black hoof
that rests solid upon the earth
bearing her beautiful weight.

This horse
—past all my questions of disintegration—
is evidence of my devotion,
but I ask myself:
How does one see a thing truly through the years?

If belief is found in action let me ride,
lost in the motion of bodies together,
how her carrying is my blessing.
Let me tribute what is truth
and grow old in her shade,
safe with my ghosts.
Let me sweep hands across dapple,
lost, tasting her dust and salt,
lost in heart pulse and hooves,
lost, to sing our melody memories
in to life.

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TO THE HORSE!

Photo by Katrina Hays