I wrote a short poem once, and I was
so excited it's in this book.
It's-- you will see horses creeping in hither and yon.
We have one now.
I am desperately allergic to him,
but I love him because my daughters do
and I launder his saddle pads and I haul him
in from the field to get his shots
and to have his new shoes put on and I'm very proud of myself.
And six months after we got him, he
came down in the frightening phrase of the barn
owner, dead lame, and had to be cared
for through all the grueling very, very cold Michigan winter
months with treatments that made that-- with to ice
the leg to keep it from swelling in the hopes of healing
his lameness and eventually it did heal,
but there were many predawn and after sunset therapy
sessions out of the barn
This poem is about that.
My going on and on is much, much longer
than the poem is but the poem--
so there's a girl in a horse in it.
Before my daughter's got this horse,
I didn't know there was the thing with girls and horses.
That's how unattached I am to the world.
But this has also in mind another watcher,
another triangle, which is that enacted in Sappho's most
famous fragment, fragment 31.
He is more than a man to me, He is a God he
who sits at your right hand and so forth.
The title of the poem comes from that the marvelous image
Sappho has for desire moving like a flame under the skin.
It's called a narrow flame.
It's just nine lines and some of them are only one word
long it's going to be like on.
"Narrow flame."
"Dark still 12 degrees below freezing.
Tremor along the elegant injured right front
leg of the gelding on the cross ties kneeling girl.
The under song of waters as she bathes
the leg in yet more cold tongue is broken God to me.
Her hair, the color of winter wind."