Two Poems 0 comments

Jill Pelaez Baumgaertner

Deer Grass

The soft earth imprints your steps from car to paddock
where you see that once again you must hoist
the saddle, sling the bridle across your shoulder,

wind the reins, and heavy-foot the fields to find her
where with only slight resistance she will swallow
the bit, feel the spread of blanket, then the heft of

saddle, the girth tightened. Adjusting the stirrups,
you will smell the leather rich with horse, appropriate
for this hour when although you would rather have propped

the saddle against the damp trunk of the plum tree
only now hinting of bloom, and feel the power of her
as if her muscles were your own, you give in to decorum,

but only this much.
You know already that riding horses is about many things:
the whish of her gait through unmown grass,

jumping small hedgerows with a clean leap,
and compromising between giving up and gaining—
you take her on and she takes you.

How do I know these things when you have told me
only this much: that on a horse you can approach a deer
if you remain as still as caught breath?

I remember the Florida trails heavy with sun and heat,
not your Illinois pasture in this lately arrived spring,
but a time between childhood and now. The flies

I could never outrun, the scrubby land, palmettos,
pines, Japanese cherry bushes lining the barbed-wire
fence, moss dripping from the oaks that occasionally

spanned the road. I’d slow from canter to walk,
lean forward, wrap my arms around the horse’s
neck, the coarse mane against my cheek.

But now I imagine you have been drifting
from thought to thought as she takes the lead,
makes decisions at the edges of fields, riding gently

the crisscrossed paths when there in the half sun
of newly leafing trees is the deer’s calm stance
containing the stun of injury, dried blood ridging the leg.

She looks across the path at the horse, you, her head
alert for sounds, her nostrils feel the air.
You know the hurt of her and can only sit still,

motionless with desire for healed wounds.
Someday when we have talked the afternoon
into silence, the water suddenly still, I will watch

the horizon, motionless, and you will tell me of the day
you rode to the edge as close as the mare could take you
without giving you away, knowing that to a deer a part

of the saddle is nothing more than a part of the horse,
you carrying the stillness like an extra sense,
I sitting without stirring, as you tell me how

soft the earth was, how the morning opened before you
and the deer stepped into it, as a match scritched
into flame for its few seconds bringing fire to fingers,

closer, closer, then quickly out.

Bodiless

for Steven Lautermilch

You leave your signature
like the atom
whose footprint is its only proof,
the pencil’s
sharp point indenting
the paper next to my poems’
lines. With what voice
you have uncovered
my concealed
intentions, presented my images
in bas-relief, and textures
I could not see until your hand
revealed the design—
just as I mark
the pages of your book
of poems—
a blade of grass, a faded ribbon,
a pressed leaf, a leather strip,
your recent letter.
In the solitude of this house
I read your words
aloud printing the air
with them. Like fragrance
the atoms dance,
disperse,
escape,
as light as flight.
I roam
through rooms of them.