Horse Latitudes

Beijing

I could still hear the musicians

cajoling those thousands of clay

horses and horsemen through the squeeze

when I woke beside Carlotta.

Life-size, also. Also terra-cotta.

The sky was still a terra-cotta frieze

over which her grandfather still held sway

with the set square, fretsaw, stencil,

plumb line, and carpenter's pencil

his grandfather brought from Roma.

Proud-fleshed Carlotta. Hypersarcoma.

For now our highest ambition

was simply to bear the light of the day

we had once been planning to seize.

Baginbun

The Nashville skyline's hem and haw

as the freebooters who freeboot

through their contractual mire and murk,

like Normans stampeding dozens

of cows into their Norse-Irish cousins,

were balking now at this massive breastwork

they themselves had thrown up. The pile of toot

on a mirror. The hip-hirple

of a white horse against purple.

Age-old traductions I could trace

from freebasers pretending they freebase

to this inescapable flaw

hidden by Carlotta's close-knit wet suit

like a heart-wound by a hauberk.

Bannockburn

Though he was mounted on a cob

rather than a warhorse, the Bruce

still managed to sidestep a spear

from Henry de Bohun and tax

de Bohun's poll with his broad-based poleax

and leave de Bohun's charger somewhat leer.

Her grandfather had yet to find a use

for the two-timing partisan

his grandfather brought man-to-man

against all those Ferdinandies

until he saw it might come in handy

for whacking the thingammybobs

off pine and fir, off pine and fir and spruce

and all such trees as volunteer.

Berwick-Upon-Tweed

Off the elm, the ancient pollard

that a Flemish painter might love,

that comes to shun the attention

of its headstrong days, so is proof

against the storm that takes its neighbor's roof.

Her nonno collects his pension

knowing that when push really came to shove

he had it within him to wrap

his legs in puttees and backslap

those pack mules down that moonlit deck,

Carlotta now wearing a halter-neck

under the long-sleeved, high-collared

wet suit whereof . . . whereof . . . whereof . . . whereof

I needs must again make mention.

Blaye

Her wet suit like a coat of mail

worn by a French knight from the time

a knight could still cause a ruction

by direct-charging his rouncy,

when an Englishman's home was his bouncy

castle, when abduction and seduction

went hand in glove. Now Carlotta would climb

from the hotel pool in Nashville,

take off her mask, and set a spill

to a Gauloise as one might set

a spill to the fuse of a falconet

and the walls of her chest assail.

The French, meanwhile, were still struggling to prime

their weapons of mass destruction.

Bosworth Field

It was clear now, through the pell-mell

of bombard- and basilisk-mist,

that the Stanleys had done the dirt

on him and taken Henry's side.

Now Richard's very blood seemed to have shied

away from him, seemed to sputter and spurt

like a falcon sheering off from his wrist

as he tried to distance himself

from the same falchioneer who'd pelf

the crown from his blood-matted brow

and hang it in a tree. Less clear was how

he'd managed not to crack the shell

of the pigeon egg the size of a cyst

he'd held so close inside his shirt

Blackwater Fort

As I had held Carlotta close

that night we watched some Xenophon

embedded with the 5th Marines

in the old Sunni Triangle

make a half-assed attempt to untangle

the ghastly from the price of gasoline.

There was a distant fanfaron

in the Nashville sky, where the wind

had now drawn itself up and pinned

on her breast a Texaco star.

"Why," Carlotta wondered, "the House of Tar?

Might it have to do with the gross

imports of crude oil Bush will come clean on

only when the Tigris comes clean?"

Benburb

Those impromptu chevaux-de-frise

into which they galloped full tilt

and impaled themselves have all but

thrown off their balance the banner-

bearing Scots determined to put manners

on the beech mast- and cress- and hazelnut-

eating Irish. However jerry-built,

those chevaux-de-frise have embogged

the horses whose manes they had hogged

so lovingly and decked with knots

of heather, horses rooted to the spots

on which they go down on their knees

as they unwind their shoulder plaids and kilts,

the checkered careers of their guts.

Boyne

The blood slick from the horse slaughter

I could no longer disregard

as Carlotta surfaced like barm.

My putting her through her paces

as she kicked and kicked against the traces

like a pack mule kicking from a yardarm

before it fell, heehaw, in the dockyard.

A banner's frittering tassel

or deflating bouncy castle

was something to which she paid heed

whereas that vision of a milk-white steed

drinking from a tub of water

and breathing hard, breathing a little hard,

had barely set off an alarm.

Blenheim

Small birds were sounding the alert

as I followed her unladen

steed through a dell so dark and dank

she might have sported the waders

her grandfather had worn at the nadir

of his career, scouring the Outer Banks

for mummichog and menhaden.

Those weeks and months in the doldrums

coming back as he ran his thumb

along an old venetian blind

in the hope that something might come to mind,

that he might yet animadvert

the maiden name of that Iron Maiden

on which he was drawing a blank.

Bunker Hill

Carlotta took me in her arms

as a campfire gathers a branch

to itself, her mouth a cauter

set to my bleeding bough, heehaw.

Her grandfather sterilizing his saw

in a tub of 100-proof firewater,

a helper standing by to stanch

the bleeding in some afterlife.

No looking daggers at the knife.

She'd meet the breast-high parapet

with the nonchalance, the no fucking sweat

of a slightly skanky schoolmarm

though the surgeon was preparing to ganch

her like What's-his-face's Daughter.

Brandywine

I crouched in my own Little Ease

by the pool at the Vanderbilt

where Carlotta crouched, sputter-sput,

just as she had in the scanner

when the nurse, keen-sighted as a lanner,

picked out a tumor like a rabbit scut

on dark ground. It was as if a fine silt,

white sand or silicate, had clogged

her snorkel, her goggles had fogged,

and Carlotta surfaced like flot

to be skimmed off some great cast-iron pot

as garble is skimmed off, or lees

painstakingly drained by turnings and tilts

from a man-size barrel or butt.

Badli-Ke-Serai

Pork barrels. Pork butts. The wide-screen

surround sound of a massed attack

upon the thin red cellulose

by those dust- or fust- or must-cells

that cause the tears to well and well and well.

At which I see him turning up his nose

as if he'd bitten on a powder-pack

like yet another sad Sepoy

who won't fall for the British ploy

of greasing with ham the hammer

or smoothing over Carlotta's grammar:

"On which . . . On which Bush will come clean."

Her grandfather a man who sees no lack

of manhood in the lachrymose.

Bull Run

While some think there's nothing more rank

than the pool that's long stood aloof

from the freshet, I loved the smell

of sweat and blood and, sí, horse dung

Carlotta shouldered like an Aqua-Lung

as she led me now through that dewy dell

and spread her House of Tartan waterproof.

As we lay there I could have sworn,

as I stared through unruffled thorns

that were an almost perfect fit

to each side of the gravel pit

where she and I'd tried to outflank

each other, I traced the mark of a hoof

(or horseshoe) in her fontanelle.

Bronkhorstspruit

I traced the age-old traduction

of a stream through a thorn thicket

as a gush from a farthingale.

Skeffington's Daughter. Skeffington.

Attention. Shun. Attention. Shun. Shun. Shun.

We lay in a siding between two rails

and watched an old white horse cross the picket

of himself and trek through the scrub

to drink from an iron-hooped tub

with the snore-snort of a tuba.

His winkers and bellyband said scuba,

while his sudden loss of suction

Carlotta knew meant a pump whose clicket's

failed in the way a clicket fails.

Basra

"The way to relieve the tension

on the line to a windjammer

is to lubricate the bollard

so it's always a little slack . . ."

Her nonno giving us the inside track

on how the mule drivers whooped and hollered

on the dock. No respite from his yammer

on boundlessness being a bind

and the most insidious kind

of censorship self-censorship

while he took Carlotta for a quick whip

through conjugation, declension,

and those other "crannies of the crammer"

in which she'd been "quite unscholared."

Bazentin

As I was bringing up her rear

a young dragoon would cock a snook

at the gunners raking the knob

of High Wood. Tongue like a scaldy

in a nest. Hadn't a Garibaldi

what might lie behind that low-level throb

like a niggle in her appointment book.

Dust? Fust? Must? The dragoon nonplussed

by his charger taking the rust

and, despite her recalcitrance,

Carlotta making a modest advance

when the thought of a falchioneer

falling to with his two-faced reaping hook

now brought back her grandfather's job.

Beersheba

Now summoned also the young Turk

who had suddenly arisen

from that great pile of toot, heehaw,

as from one of Beersheba's wells.

Like the sail that all of a sudden swells

on the yawl that all of a sudden yaws,

a wind finding meaning in a mizzen

and toppling a bouncy castle.

Her grandfather fain to wrastle

each pack mule to a rubber mat

whereat . . . whereat . . . whereat . . . whereat . . . whereat . . .

he would eftsoons get down to work,

reaching into its wide-open wizen

while a helper clamped back its jaws.

Burma

Her grandfather's job was to cut

the vocal cords of each pack mule

with a single, swift excision,

a helper standing by to wrench

the mule's head fiercely to one side and drench

it with hooch he'd kept since Prohibition.

"Why," Carlotta wondered, "that fearsome tool?

Was it for fear the mules might bray

and give their position away?"

At which I see him thumb the shade

as if he were once more testing a blade

and hear the two-fold snapping shut

of his four-fold, brass-edged carpenter's rule:

"And give away their position."

Source: Horse Latitudes (Farrar Straus and Giroux, 2006)