Sunday Poem

AT THE HORSE PAVILION

We lost you once,

at the Horse Pavilion, on a day

of snappy wind beating five flags

above that brilliant nightmare green

in the sun and beyond prayer but ready to

live on a diet of it for the rest of our days,

we ducked and ran among faces made blank or tender

by our terror, so that we understood for the first time

that this was the way the world was truly divided:

into those faces that could be startled into goodness,

and those that could not, but none of them worth

anything at all to us except for what

they could tell us as we kept calling out to them

the only words left to us, A little boy!, and the

colours of the clothes you were wearing, while the

polished horses kept mindlessly

clearing gates that were hardships,

but distant, whitewashed, the hardships of others,

and sounds mocked us too, in that whinnied

bright air--a ring of faint surf, the civil, evil

sound of horsemen's applause, and we ran into

each other and ran back and ran through the

stadium of stalls and sick straw-smell and ran out

into the sun of the Pavilion's mud plaza

and there you were, on the other side

of the soot track that led toward the weeping

green park, your eyes fixed without flinching

on the main doorway, waiting for us to come out

sometime before dark and we fled to you, crying

your name and I could see in your eyes

how hard you'd been standing your ground

against terror, how long you'd been forbidding

yourself to invent us, as if in inventing us you'd have

lost all chance to see us come out to you,

but how brilliant you seemed, having saved yourself

from harm, you didn't know it, you turned

your face to the taut thigh of my skirt,

not to cry, and we walked that way,

my hand holding your head to me while I

could have sworn I could feel you inhaling

what I was thinking through the skirt's grass-engraved

cotton: Until this moment I never knew what love is.

From Fortress of Chairs (1992) by Elisabeth Harvor