Burke’s Goddess

On the phone, when the vet who was waylaid

sounded stunned by what Burke had just described,

and reasoned that the mare was getting worse,

Burke, although at first sorely grief-winded,

found within himself another cup of poise,

downed it quick, and then, as recommended,

brought the sweating goddess out of  the yard,

and out behind the sheds to the meadow, where,

all her days, that always precious beast,

object now of  true tenderness, had grazed.

She had, give or take, an hour of  life left.

The vet would bless her warm, motionless bulk.

Which meant the final comforts she would know

would come from Burke: his loss-directed hands,

softly placed onto her pain-loosened neck;

and his unconventional words, through which he hoped

a light-headed, death-brimming horse might think

itself shielded by gratitude. He wished

that she understood him, and then sensed she did.

And so his palliative work went on.

Her lack of confidence notwithstanding,

when he told her to walk she acquiesced.

And then they lapped the field’s October square,

transported, it almost seemed, into peace,

as they observed in tandem the old terrain.

Her two paths to the trough; the ghost Toyota

beyond the decommissioned iron gate;

the hawthorns, perfect on their plinths of dung.

And now, an aspect of the living hill

at the field’s far end, a final juncture

of  sightseeing in this time of despair:

she brightly gazes toward some half threat

(a figment, Burke believes, a nothingness

italicized, where a slope of  young ferns

appears to rage beneath the wind’s aura)

while he insists there are no grounds for fear.

He caresses her, and praises her, stopping

short of begging her to survive. And still

the labor of  her courage-thickened lungs

communicates her end through his wet hands

and thereby makes him (as such things have before)

a soul unreasonable in the face of loss.

He stands back, looks at her, and then reflects:

she’s past it, though alert. The signs are mixed.

The walking has imposed some pain relief,

but any moment now she’ll try to kneel.

And soon she does, pathetically and slow.

And Burke grows angry, thinking of his life

and life itself as heights of oblivion.

The mare gives him a weird, dependent look.

But, committed now to refusing love’s

conscription, Burke makes no reply. He needs

his loss of hope fulfilled, and wants her gone.

And yet, in what is left of her, there’s new

authority. What is it, there in the peat

of her eyes, and in the weeping oaken mask

his heart refers to as a perfect face,

that tells him this platform of cold-blown grass

conceals a river which, all thoughts be damned,

they will bridge together for all time?