‘Tell me about the horse,’
I heard her say.
She stepped through a doorway
into a dim enclosed space
and the light was poor and
she waited on his answer,
knowing he was in thrall
stumbling his steps
on the damp stone floor after her.
‘This is the back of the stable
and through the holes in the tin mesh
you perceive the back of your horse,’
she said.
He was intent on the back of her head, however,
that was where his eyes went back,
from a glance at what could have been
the shape of a horse,
to the soft down on her neck
and to the cobwebbed gossamer
folds of her hair,
to the intersecting faces of the fibres
prismatic, though there was no sunlight.
‘I can’t say,’ he said.
‘I have never seen him from here.
Is that my horse?’
The huge hindquarters heaved
against the keep of the stable wall.
Hooves shuffled, smell of horse
rose and rippled into the space.
Laughed, I laughed, then a breath later
I said to her,
‘He said, "He has never seen his horse
from that angle, from behind,
and so he could not comment."’
But the more ludicrous
it seemed to me
the emptier was the laughter.
For he dashed his hand on the latch
releasing the horse
reefing it around
and she was compliant with
whatever he had in mind.
And her face, ions dancing,
was electric.
On her chin a tremble,
at the sides of her mouth,
on her upper lip,
around her nostrils,
sweat-conducted over her cheeks,
along the line of her nose,
to her eyes,
to her eyes,
all was charged.

copyright © Errol J. Kidd 2001

(Bio of Errol J. Kidd: Lives in Hobart Australia. Was a teacher. Writer of screenplays and working on 2 novels. Poetry presently published in ezines, in US, UK, Switzerland, The Phillipines, Canada, and Australia.)