from Rider [II]

And yesterday something shattering happened.

Not yesterday, but several (that’s becoming

a favorite word) weeks ago I came across

Kitaj’s The Jewish Rider and wept:

there he was in the very image of my stepfather;

the pate where a few strands of hair still frolic,

the same skinny legs, the same misguided

attempt to dress in a sporty way (who’s

watching?), the same abstractedness,

the same shlumpy—boneless—posture, gazing not

at the landscape flashing past

with wires lashed to the treetops as if with one

tug the countryside would vanish,

or listening to the tick of the rails,

but fixed—distractedly—on his lower extremities,

white loafers and the crease in his pants and nylon

socks to see whether or not he should roll them up … ;

no: looking both beyond and through physical space

into an inner dark. Why else draw the eyes as shadows?

It’s his glimpse into another world.

My mother’s father hunted and rode.

My father rode and fished.

My stepfather never budged

from his Barca Lounger

once the amber liquid began to pour. He had a spiritual life

and a social life and no

physical life. But he liked it

that I was always outside:

maybe that’s why he never

got on my back about grades;

he might have thought

that this boy has to be outside

at this time in his life.

Maybe it’s more important

that he roam the canyons and the hills

that he know the streets

that he come home

covered with leaves and bark and mud,

than that he sit there

like a good young scholar

like I was, a Rabbi

at twenty giving money home

to my parents in their cabbagy tenement

in the Bronx. This is a boy

who needs space. One time—

I think I had my learner's permit—

he rented a Mustang

convertible in L.A. and for several

days I drove around

past the long rows of used car lots

and the bruised facades of restaurants

digging up relatives, my hoarse-voiced

arthritic aunt in the shadows of

her goldenrod colored ranch house,

limping like Ruffian

after her last run

in the wet dirt at Belmont Stakes.

But I’ve said nothing about what made me weep.

It's in the contrast between Kitaj's alter cocker

seeking comfort on a train,

and Rembrandt’s taut youth

setting off into the rampant amber on horseback;

it’s in the image of active life juxtaposed

with the image of sedentary contemplation—

though no one travels on horseback now

and heroism has become

attending AIDS patients

or sheltering the homeless.

The raw youth’s feet are planted

lightly yet firmly in his stirrups.

His coat glows with many colors.

Not so The Jewish Rider.

And yet—there's something more.

Michael Hoffman writes that New York

is not what it was when I was too young

to have marked the existence of The Blue Note,

but I can pick up this trail

by walking across the park to the Frick.

And Barbara Hershey wouldn’t have been at the Frick in 1959

(they don’t allow children under sixteen)

in black skin tight pants, black sweater,

(the female uniform of our generation

whose male version substitutes

black jeans, baseball hat, and bomber jacket—

though who knows what decorous garments

she’d checked in the cloakroom),

and white boots with plenty

of Elizabethan ruff at the edges,

pausing to look at The Polish Rider

while I scribbled notes. Her white

boots stood out against the dominant dark

like the Jewish Rider’s white loafers.

And that was good because the light in the painting is brief

whatever the time of day, sunrise or sunset,

and the rider’s gaze, looking out over

unknown space, is inward.

I followed his eyes through the archway toward canvases

where clouds roll over harbors

against the whiteness of sails

or toward gilded robes and velvet-hung rooms,

then back to meet wisdom’s bared breast

in Veronese’s Wisdom and Strength…

(Why didn’t Veronese have the nerve

to call his painting Woman

With Bare Breasts, like Tintoretto?

Why an allegorical title when the bare

flesh and bones and sinew would have done?)

He spends his life looking not

at far off hills or citadels or

the lights in the village below:

he has no choice but to fix

on her one bared breast, her swelling nipple.

I can’t figure out what landscape

he might be facing in the painted world.

The clatter of rocks and hooves

echoes over the stony plain.

I was no rider, but a pretend

horse and rider always rode

beside my train window—at a canter

no matter how fast the rails clicked by—

and though he wore a bandana

and leaned slightly forward in the saddle

to pull himself aboard,

his gaze, wide-ranging yet intent,

was like the Polish Rider’s.

Even as an only child I was never lonely.

My mother's father rode until he was old

and on a narrow pass his horse

jammed him up against rockface.

In his narrative of his life

this collision marked

the ruin of his hip

the rise of his cataracts.

My father rode “every morning before work.”

I never witnessed that,

but at a ranch in upper New York State

while I bloodied my hands

tugging the reins of a frothing giant

who would not budge from a weedpatch,

I watched him disappear

in his black polo shirt and khaki jodhpurs

as he galloped over a far off hill:

more at ease in the saddle—in the air—

than I’d ever seen him in civilian life.

My woman friend in El Paso lives to ride.

Only the Jewish Rider and I do not ride!

That’s the stuff of events. What about

the signature inscribed by the sun,

the dark clouds sinister in just being there;

thresholds, exchanges going on in the village below,

candles lit in the deep interiors,

bread, wine, the plate making its way

around the table; what about—

leaping centuries ahead—

the energy from generators blazing

like auras through the clouds

the scattered lights,

the rotating tops of ambulances;

the tuna casseroles and macaroni and cheese

making the rounds, apple sauce

passing from high chair to bib, the Wonder Bread

on a calcified plate,

children eating, heads down, in silence,

communicating through eye movements,

the mother wiping her lips, the father

grinning stupidly and drooling;

the television quacking in the background,

the perfect suburban night unfolding

in bedroom and drive-in and den,

the sprinkler system ticking.

The snipers in the tower—.

This is what the riders,

guests everywhere and nowhere,

say goodbye to as their horses break into a canter

as night comes down. And last

night, driving to Connecticut,

I understood that the Polish Rider

gleans the permutations of light after dusk,

that its olive-gray smudges reflect

the absence of pitch-darkness. I was wrong

about the Polish Rider all along:

he doesn’t depart at nightfall, he stops for a moment

crossing difficult terrain (anticipating rockslide?)

in the night, because, as the faint light

rimming the edges of the sky makes clear,

night is not absolute black, but rough-hewn and curious.

The rider lives in order to depart.

The Woman Who Rode

She hitched her horse to the gateposts of my house.

Bare trees, frost, the whole bit.

I wanted our lives to be like that:

as rife with silences as a Quaker meeting.

She came to me in her stride.

Dropped her crop on the chair.

Peeled off her britches and boots; crawled

under the covers.

Her hour in the saddle had “made her ready.”

I felt like an accessory.

The wound was open. Drowsily I rolled

onto her, no longer caring if she

was using me. As the new

year wore on and black ice made riding

a fast track to certain death

or paralysis, she grew tense.

Came to me now with clinical terms,

“schi” words I worked hard to break down.

The good news was she was not a true

“split personality”—the glitch

that “she was divorced

from herself, and could not love or care.”

The light in her house

was like the light before dawn.

On the last of my rare visits

her mother jarred preserves while we watched

instant replays of Robert Kennedy die and die.

Her father skulked upstairs, perhaps

testing gadgets; or wishing me off his daughter;

or taking precautions I would not overhear

what words were ricocheting

on his “hot line” to the patent office.

Any objective observer standing back

from the distraction of the impinging present

could see that her torment overleapt

any visible signs and that she was—

as a WASP “rider”—the wrong

person for the place she was in.

Her resilience could not be in question.

She lived to stray from known paths

to leap stone fences and break into open fields.

When her horse went down in an Irish bog

and she was trampled—hooves branding her cheek—

the next day she up and mounted him again.

When she came to me in the dream last night

her smile had loosened.

How lovely she looked in her blue silk blouse.

How well it lit up the colors of her hair.