Horse Lattitudes
 

Beijing

I could still hear the musicians 

cajoling those thousands of clay 

horses and horsemen through the squeeze 

when I woke beside Carlotta.

Life-size, also. Also terra-cotta.

The sky was still a terra-cotta frieze 

over which her grandfather still held sway

with the set-square, fret-saw, stencil,

plumb-line and carpenter's pencil

his grandfather brought from Roma.

Proud-fleshed Carlotta. Hypersarcoma.

For now our highest ambition

was simply to bear the light of the day 

we had once been planning to seize.
 
 

Bannockburn

Though he was mounted on a cob

rather than a war-horse, the Bruce

still managed to side-step a spear

from Henry de Bohun and tax

de Bohun's poll with his broad-based pole-ax

and leave de Bohun's charger somewhat leer.

Her grandfather had yet to find a use

for the two-timing partisan 

his grandfather brought man-to-man

against all those Ferdinandies 

until he saw it might come in handy

for whacking the thingammybobs

off pine and fir, off pine and fir and spruce

and all such trees as volunteer.
 
 

Bosworth Field

It was clear now, through the pell-mell 

of bombard- and basilisk-mist, 

that the Stanleys had done the dirt

on him and taken Henry's side.                                        .

Now Richard's very blood seemed to have shied

away from him, seemed to sputter and spurt

like a falcon sheering off from his wrist

as he tried to distance himself

from the same falchioneer who'd pelf

the crown from his blood-matted brow 

and hang it in a tree. Less clear was how

he'd managed not to crack the shell

of the pigeon-egg the size of a cyst

he'd held so close inside his shirt.
 
 

Blackwater Fort

As I had held Carlotta close 

that night we watched some Xenophon

embedded with the 5th Marines 

in the old Sunni triangle

make a half-assed attempt to untangle

the ghastly from the price of gasoline.

There was a distant fanfaron 

in the Nashville sky where the wind

had now drawn itself up and pinned

on her breast a Texaco star.

"Why," Carlotta wondered, "the House of Tar?

Might it have to do with the gross 

imports of crude oil Bush will come clean on 

only when the Tigris comes clean?" 
 
 

Benburb

Those impromptu chevaux-de-frise

into which they galloped full tilt

and impaled themselves have all but

thrown off their balance the banner-
                             .
bearing Scots determined to put manners

on the beech mast- and cress- and hazelnut- 

eating Irish. However jerry-built,

those chevaux-de-frise have embogged

the horses whose manes they had hogged

so lovingly and decked with knots 

of heather, horses rooted to the spots

on which they go down on their knees

as they unwind their shoulder-plaids and kilts, 

the checkered careers of their guts. 
 
 

Blenheim

Small birds were sounding the alert

as I followed her unladen

steed through a dell so dark and dank

she might have sported the waders

her grandfather had worn at the nadir 

of his career, scouring the Outer Banks 

for mummichog and menhaden.

Those weeks and months in the doldrums 

coming back as he ran his thumb

along an old Venetian blind 

in the hope that something might come to mind,

that he might yet animadvert 

the maiden name of that Iron Maiden

on which he was drawing a blank. 
 
 

Brandywine

I crouched in my own Little Ease

by the pool at the Vanderbilt

where Carlotta crouched, sputter-sput, 

just as she had in the scanner

when the nurse, keen-sighted as a lanner,

picked out a tumor like a rabbit-scut

on dark ground. It was as if a fine silt,

white sand or silicate, had clogged

her snorkel, her goggles had fogged,

and Carlotta surfaced like flot 

to be skimmed off some great cast-iron pot

as garble is skimmed off, or lees

painstakingly drained by turnings and tilts

from a man-sized barrel or butt.
 
 

Badli-ke-Serai

Pork-barrels. Pork-butts. The Widescreen

Surround Sound of a massed attack 

upon the thin red cellulose 

by those dust- or fust- or must-cells 

that cause the tears to well and well and well.

At which I see him turning up his nose

as if he'd bitten on a powder-pack

like yet another sad Sepoy

who won't fall for the British ploy

of greasing with ham the hammer

or smoothing over Carlotta's grammar:

"On which; On which Bush will come clean."

Her grandfather a man who sees no lack

of manhood in the lachrymose.
 
 

Bull Run

While some think there's nothing more rank 

than the pool that's long stood aloof

from the freshet, I loved the smell

of sweat and blood and, si, horse-dung

Carlotta shouldered like an aqualung 

as she led me now through that dewy dell

and spread her House of Tartan waterproof.

As we lay there I could have sworn,

as I stared through unruffled thorns

that were an almost perfect fit

to each side of the gravel pit

where she and I'd tried to outflank

each other, I traced the mark of a hoof

(or horseshoe), in her fontanelle.
 
 

Bazentin

As I was bringing up her rear 

a young dragoon would cock a snook

at the gunners raking the knob

of High Wood. Tongue like a scaldy

in a nest. Hadn't a Garibaldi

what might lie behind that low-level throb

like a niggle in her appointment-book.

Dust? Fust? Must? The dragoon nonplussed 

by his charger taking the rust

and, despite her recalcitrance,

Carlotta making a modest advance

when the thought of a falchioneer

falling to with his two-faced reaping hook

now brought back her grandfather's job.
 
 

Burma

Her grandfather's job was to cut

the vocal chords of each pack-mule
with a single, swift excision,
a helper standing by to wrench
the mule's head fiercely to one side and drench 
it with hooch he'd kept since Prohibition.
"Why," Carlotta wondered, "that fearsome tool? 
Was it for fear the mules might bray
and give their position away?"
At which I see him thumb the shade
as if he were once more testing a blade 
and hear the two-fold snapping shut
of his four-fold, brass-edged carpenter's rule: 
"And give away their position."