AFTER THE SOLSTICE, MACHU PICCHU

© Maureen Hurley 1984 All rights reserved.

On the northern slopes of the Andes, 
the packhorse veered sharply from the trail
that led to the fabled lost city of the gods,
makeshift hacamore biting into his eyes
he was running blind, but his hooves knew
the paths, both sacred and profane.

I pulled the runaway's head into in my lap,
I gasped as the thin air whipped my face
thigh muscles burning to maintain balance,
but his eye was a lake of fear rimmed by a pale shore
as I hammered on his hollow forehead with my fist.
Perhaps he was remembering his Andalusian blood,
his tail was a prayer flag raised high to the wind.

The grey gelding raced up the slope to a chicha bar.
Unaccustomed to the live weight upon his back,
his hooves tattooed a drumroll of panic on hard clay.
At the last second, I hoisted a leg over his neck,
as he slammed sideways into the adobe wall,
the wooden pack frame splintered into kindling
and the hut resounded like a wooden drum.

The startled Indios abandoned their beer gourds
and scattered to the four directions like crickets
away from the flash and churn of hooves and teeth,
and a crazy gringa astride a wild packhorse, sidesaddle,
without a bridle, only a stiff lariat across his nose.


* * *

Like Frost's pony, the dappled packhorse

was used to stopping there. No frozen woods
or downy lake, this was an alien land. He stood shaken,
with heaving flanks, head hung low, nostrils flaring red,
as the Indios gathered around a crazy Epona in their midst.

The Poet rode up to translate us out of that mess.
The Gates of the Sun and Moon to the Lost City
of the Incas opened wide to let us in.
We made peace offerings on the intihuacana.
We made poetry, equating it to eternal love,
we played a benediction of mathematical equations
with the piercing stars of the Southern Cross,
compared it to the emptiness of the sky to the south,
and descended into the inferno, as a forest fire
raged on like a ruby-throated monster gone mad
on the terraced slopes of Machu Picchu.



But when we returned home from the Cordilleras,
the Poet went south, without so much as a tu
or an entonces or even a pues, he translated
the burden of a mid-life crisis, into the classic
binary subdivision with a blonde student—
younger than his daughter. Of course. She was
a descendant of the ill-fated Donner Party,
she was born into a cannibal hunger for men,
and a survivor's lust for horseflesh and melodrama,
he blamed her strange appetites on the vagaries
of weather and stars but in the end, 
she left him for another woman.

Poetic justice.
4/24/2009  
24 Write a travel-related poem

More horsy bits from me:

Sitting Deep

Horse chestnuts

The Little Shits

Helgar the Horrible

There is so Much We Save from Childhood

William Pitt Root‎ to Mo Hurley April 26, 2009 at 12:19pm ·
I like what you've brought into "After the Solstice..." At first the coda seemed dragged in-- as poem, not as experience--, then I realized if the poem is presented in 2 stanza units (*'s or whatever as dividers) the segments of narrative fall into place feeling whole and strong. Just a quick take. Glad you pulled it out of the hat at last!

Love your account of packhorse run. [It's "Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening" though, not "Road Not Taken."] Do write more about that ride.

Mo Hurley Both Mike Tuggle and Sharon Dubiago were always after me to write about the stories...but I said it wasn't poetry...and being dyslexic, I am afraid of prose. Since I just read Pam's Neruda poem, I wrote this...still very much in draft, I'm afraid.