Eredien's Journal

Lunge Line Exercise
for cristalia

Endless cold Saturdays of
sawdust gilding the floors,
the sun rising gold through gold.
The closet racists in their warmest plaids,
hair straggling free from hats, rubber-bands,
feathery round their faces, haloes
in some Dutch Masters' painting
in the now-brightening dark.

Refilling yellow buckets, rims coated
with yellow hay and lazy flies;
a lazy shifting waking of
a thousand pounds. A morning
piss, vile boring jokes,
the edges worn off, secondhand
tack. These barrel chests,
swift gaits, tossing manes,
power gentled by control:
the centaur metaphor's never subtle,
and girls eventually will move
from their horses, understudies
to their men.

That's the line they feed
like pastry stale as sugared soap
in the tack room;
these barrel chests,
swift gaits, old fast times
of horses in lithographs,
long-dead. Power gentled by control.

All those shades of brown learnt, forgot
from brown books, what passed for a childhood.
I'm not who I thought I'd be; self-gentling's
hard: you don't know
what to do when you throw yourself,
hold or let go,
and can't remember
which is best to praise.

[NB: this is so much ridiculously better than the first draft of this poem was. I'm going to bed happy.]