HELEN: TANZANIA DRESSAGE

                                    —for Helen Tyrrell

1. The path misbehaves at the oasis,

a long way from the mirrored halls

of l’Ecole Vienna where a young woman

put Lippizan stallions through flying paces.

A vessel tumbles from her head

and the Tanzanian children laugh.

She has eight years to perfect this skill,

carrying water back to the cooking pots.

Water outwits the thirsty African earth

in a merry chase to the river,

becomes a dusty mercurial snake

seeking the source of the Nile,

finds wings, transcends air.

Lakes hunger for the sky,

swimming stars take flight,

approach the caravan of the storm,

& the shimmering sands of Zanzibar

harbor the illusion of water.

Billowing clouds return to the Serengeti

where riderless horses solemnly waltz

against the feast of sky.

Hooves against stone—

Sidestep to go forward.

Passage on the diagonal.

Once the ballet of dressage

—the lunge, the cabriolet—

were movements for the dance of war.

2. Kirk screws on the legs of the piano,

wheels it into the concert hall.

Frees his music from the belly

of the wooden horse for this Helen, mother

of orphans whose mothers abandoned them.

His arms are snowfields,

an avalanche of notes crescendo

under the equatorial reign

of watermusic to slake us.

The ceiling of the sky

is crowned with thorns.

On the slopes of Kilimanjaro

the leopard, asleep, dreams

the eland is his lover. 

Once I stood in the palace arena in Moscow, the frieze of horses and again in Vienna, in Budapest. As a child I couldn’t take my eyes off those horses. I have seen the ones who no longer care to dance, pulling tourists from one cathedral to another. I patted a sorry nag, the coachman snarled, Claudia intervened, saying it’s all right. The horse was too weary to even respond. Distant music caught its ear—a flicker of life. In front of the stature of the Plague, of the holocaust & cathedrals of venerable age. I have seen them listening to their own kind of music, briskly trotting the cobbled streets. I worry about their legs. Shin splints. This rough magic In Hungary no one can afford the dancing horses, they  become street artists conning coins from the tourists.