Landscape with Unsettled Figures
        ... As if this big / dangerous animal is also a part of me...
                —Ada Limón, "How to Triumph Like a Girl"

I am a painting in which a woman is standing in front of a horse
or in which a horse is standing in front of a woman.
Behind them both is a copse of maples and tall birches
from which predators may emerge. Pretend everything here
is beautiful. The woman and the horse stand at the border of sunlight
and shade cast by the trees. In this painting the image of the woman
and the image of the horse slip and flip into the shape of the other,
from subject position to negative space and back. The horse
is dark sorrel, blue-red like my dress, in the dream.
In the dream I stand next to the horse, whose reins
have just been handed to me. She watches me with her large,
soft eyes while I recall my real sorrel mare guarding my real
old gelding, his swayed back, his arthritic hocks.
The mare spooks, initially, at the movement in the belly-tall grass
of their shared field. He, with his cataracts, unaware,
except by her reaction. Then she darts toward
the furred form that shivers the seedheads with its lurking,
her teeth bared and neck serpentine; she dives to strike
with her front hooves and just misses as the coyote leaps
and flees between strands of the wire fence. The green
metal posts frame her whirl as she spins and kicks
with her hind hooves, missing again. One reason I loved
this mare: her lithe athleticism, her balletic action,
even in response to threats. But too many times, evading
imagined assassins, she stomped my feet or bumped me
off them or bolted over the top of me. And in her elder
years, she sometimes confused me with a creature
to be feared, and bared her teeth against me.
I nearly lost a finger, once, when I brushed a spot
her blanket had rubbed wrong. Another time, she bit
my hipbone while I cleaned small cuts she'd suffered
chasing our neighbor's yellow lab out of her pasture.
Her figure had shaded again to ambiguity as, predator-like,
at first she'd stalked the dog, then, at close range, rushed him.
He'd just made it safely through the fence, but she, enraged,
had failed to brake in time. Her cuts healed soon;
the tooth mark bruises on my hip took months
to fade. At the end, when she kicked my knee,
I knew what I had to do, but knew also
the unfairness of the power I held to do it.
And this awareness: that mare and I, she in her fears
and I in my fears that included my fear of her,
were two facing mirrors. Two faces countenancing
each other, forming between us a chalice. What is
the figure? What is the ground? The chalice contains
both of our past traumas, both of our panicked evasions,
but also the scent of sweet grass grazed in spring,
the kinetic blisses of her gallop, her floating trot.
The images superimpose, separate, recombine: her fear
and mine of what we are sure is coming to get us—
and the power I borrow, still, from her,
this horse in shadow, horse in brilliant light.

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Copyright © 2020 Jennifer Bullis All rights reserved
from Cave Wall
Reprinted by Verse Daily® with permission