A poem about marriage I guess, or horses.
I started to write the poem because my grandfather had
two work horses, plow horses that were
almost members of the family.
And the dominant member of the pair was Nell
and the other member of the pair was Charlie, an old gelding.
They lived to be 30--
Charlie lived to be 31 years old and he died.
And then actually Nell grieved herself to death.
She wouldn't eat after he died.
And my grandfather buried her in the pasture
and she just hung around the place where he was buried.
But it seemed to me that in a way,
that they were a model for my own marriage with kind of--
I keep asking my kids, I said, who's the boss in this family?
And they always say, Gloria.
And I can't help that.
That's not the way my father taught me to do it.
And even though she was smarter than my father,
I don't know how it worked out, but it doesn't seem to me
that being a member of a pair is always an altogether good thing.
There's something incredibly sad about being in a team
like Charlie and Nell or Rodney and Gloria.
Not until my father had led her into the paddock
and driven her a month in circles
and made her walk six weeks with a collar on her neck
and the bag of seeds on her back did he snap the leather traces
to the hamess.
For she was not green halter-broke
when he took her that way, rearing and shying
at each birdcall of shadow.
It would be another year in blinders
before she began seeing how it would go from then on,
moving not as herself alone but as one of a pair,
with the sorrel gelding of the same general conformation
and breed shuffling beside her, and between them
only the split tongue of the wagon.
As is often the case with couples,
he the subdued, philosophical one,
and she with the great spirit and the preternatural knack
of opening gates.
They had barely become a team when the beasts began vanishing
from the fields, and the fields, one by one,
fell before the contagion of houses.
Still, they were there for a long time
after the first tractors and the testing of rockets,
so you could see how it had been that way for years
with them, just the one motion again and again.
Until at dusk when the harnesses were lifted, the odor that rose
seemed history itself, and they bent to their feed
in the light that would be that way for the rest of their lives.