Invisible Horses
Invisible Horses
You rode by every day on one
of your invisible horses
making your way to school
or home from school
or wherever.
The invisible horse I liked
to see you on the most
was a mare of 16 hands
with a hide river-brown and
dappled white and shimmering
like the Blackwater does
as it canters past
with the sunlight
coming down on it in shreds
like a tottering mirror
through hollies and yew trees
near Innishannon
on a morning in winter.
A long and pristine white mane
fluttering at you like rapids.
Eyes like eels’ mouths.
Hoofs that clattered tarmacadam,
raising mist
like every legendary steed.
Tiny phantoms rose and fell in the steam of your galloping heels.
I remember your crazy mom as well.
Your mom had a want in her
that was bigger than her.
Your mom was Ophelia withered
and ten times dead.
She kept getting drowned in the
depths of the night
and coming up soaked through
in her charity rags
to that neverending racket of
swearwords and cries and wheezes and snorts
in the caravan dawn
Your mother was a voodoo doll.
Everyone she ever met drew
needles pricked with shame and hate
and stuck them into her.
Your Da was a paralytic and a shapeshifter.
He'd weep with one eye open
at the counter into bottled stout
and swear contrition to the barman
as if Georgie Best was on his death-bed
being interviewed by St Peter.
Next night he'd be a showband
on a tour that never stopped
burning up the dancefloor lino
another alcoholic sorcerer
reshaping with the mysteries of ethanol.
He morphed into badly-toupeed Johnny Cash
or stiff-hipped Elvis.
Your little brothers and sisters
were skinny and pale and downcast and quiet
and sometimes transparent.
I see them now as changelings
on the losing side
in an immortal war
dropped in these hostile
at best indifferent dimensions
maliciously
or for concealment.
No wonder I so often spied them
trying to flicker out of our cruelty.
I see them too as medieval stragglers
strung out beggars going village to village
on a rope,
each one of them a suffering bead
on a barbed wire rosary
that circled their existences
and each in a role like 'Hunger’, ‘Misery’,
'Penitence' and ‘Doom’
extras in a traveling pageant
they didn’t care to understand
didn't see the point of,
to which they hadn't quite committed.
You contradicted.
You were Love and you were Rage.
Imagination's Crazy Faith.
All tomorrow's Sustenance and Glory.
The Undefeated Forward Flow of Hope and All-inclusive Energy.
What was not there but badly wanted,
you created.
A Totem and a Tower
and a Deity
to me.
You used to whoop and lassoo
as brazen and loud as you could
from up front
as you all went by together
all you brothers and sisters
on your way to school or from school
or wherever
urging the smallest, the last, the wheeziest,
whoever downhearted was falling behind
to get up and ride
as hard as they could
at the oncoming wind,
on one of your herd
of invisible horses.