Letter to Sigrun in Iceland (Helgar the Horrible)

Icelandic Horses in the rain mic@vikinghorse.freeserve.co.uk
Sigrun,

Alas I have no photos of Helgar the Horrible, who by this time is probably in Icelandic horse heaven! He was a gelding, not a stallion. I suspect that's why he was allowed to come to the US in the first place, no danger of gene pool problems.

He was unusual, some of his behavior was unlike that horses. Closer to pony or donkey behavior. Unlike the donkeys, he was not revengeful & didn't carry a grudge. BUT you never knew quite what to expect from him. He wasn't as wily as the Shetlands. Boy was he sometimes thick-headed: both metaphorically & literally! He once tried to take me right through a water tank. Guess physics wasn't his strong point... We never quite knew what made him tick. He was pretty enigmatic. Sometimes his brakes didn't work right so we never knew what to expect....

He was surefooted...except whenever he had a momentary lapse with physics, that is. He never needed shoeing, his hard hooves were like flint. You could ride him all day long and he never would tire, no matter how steep the mountain, and believe me, we rode hard. We took our assorted ponies, horses, donkeys and an occasional lonesome stunted (dwarf) bull calf named Mr. Smitts out for miles over the steep coastal ridges of Marin County, Northern California, as far as Point Reyes national seashore, and Bolinas (from Forest Knolls)... (we called the bull calf that because he was smitten by our Shetland ponies, and didn't know he was a bovine... which was downright embarrassing in the spring when his hormones began to run... he'd hop up right behind me, and the danger of being impaled in the back by his horns was...but I digress.)

ONE'S SULLEN CRAFT

It was fair great meeting in the Marin (F)art & Garden parking lot even if your are the landlord in the Seagull and Anna is nowhere to be found because you've eaten all the apricots in the tree like thieves in the night and what was left but unripe peaches and you know what kind of bellyaching ther'll be if we'd et those and the bird has flown while we searched for Chekov's cherry trees--and how many times did he rewrite it? A lesson to persevere one's sullen craft.

EGRETS FOR SINEAD

Where the sun is shining, and the sky is that incredible cerulean when you stare straight up at its infinite blueness, and you forget everything only to have an egret enroute to the lake cross your trajectory and you remember it's in the city after all: the distant pounding of surf, the cars on the freeway while I hold vigil for my cousin in hospital, a victim of that same stretch of road. With shaking hands, I made three silk scarves, the gutta forgiving. Roses, egrets, orchids, sky emerge from the void.

MAYDAY: HOLDING VIGIL FOR SINEAD

National Birthdays freewrite

By the dawn’s early light, we are counting syllables, and singing Anacretontic verse, odes to the battle of Baltimore. Bal-ti-mor my granny would say, parsing out the Irish word, the great house of Bel (not Bal), the god of fire. Bel, as in Belgrade, Beograd. No bears here, just the last fires of summer, approaching Lugnasadh and waiting for the fire hill signal on every hill, the signal to alight the Wicker Man’s annual burning—custom pre-dating the rocket’s red glare by several millennia. But everything follows what came before it. In this, nothing is original. They say the bombs bursting in air over the deserts of Baghdad were like an early Fourth of July. We celebrated the war on St. Patrick’s Day, and the Irish community was up in arms, the holiday having been usurped, and sullied —his birthday? Who knows. But it became that after the poet died. What so proudly we hail. Where do we all hail from? My brain is on fire at the twilight’s last gleaming beneath a full moon, a blue moon—to herald in the birth of a nation with all its bigotry and glory, Cassandra-faced and blind, smiling with false grace to the new dawn. Call it Fahrenheit, 911.

7/2/2004 Writers’ Group

Blue Moon, Broken Chad freewrite

Wide-open, anything: blue moons in July, birthdays of good friends, of a nation, out of Iraq, Saddam’s continued arrogance, Bush’s too. Speaking of broken chads, they even have a name for it, Chad. And Bush is Bible beating the south into submission, seeking parishioners to vote. It’s going to be that kind of close. Anything to do with conflict of interest? It took an act of Congress to put God into the Pledge of Allegiance, the dollar bill, and into the national anthem, which was once a drinking tune called Anacreon. The original subject: makes love, not war. Anacreon was a poet of Greece who fled fromCyrus the Great. I envisioned that he fled to Thrace, because he, like Homer was no fighter. He flung down his sword and shield and fled to live in another day. Many other days in the courts of Polycrates. He lived so long that Heradotus, who was forever trying to stick one foot into the same river twice, commented upon it. 85 years! A marvel. But Pliney (the Elder?) says he choked on a grape stone. Grape stone? Cherry stone? Pits? Chads? The chad of the grape, voting for vino, no fish here, just wine, and women and song. But that’s how it was, pleasing the despots and tyrants, give them what they want. Nubile maidens and lads and popped cherries. That’s what Anacreon lived to write another day for, and then Thomas Moore translated him, a song written to Anacreon, time traveling across the centuries to settle in and find a new home. Oh say, can you see? As the rosy-fingered dawn rises to the rocket’s red glare….

7/2/2004 Writers’ Group