Poem for Wednesday and Equestrian Madness

The Horses 

By Ted Hughes 

I climbed through woods in the hour-before-dawn dark.

Evil air, a frost-making stillness,

Not a leaf, not a bird,—

A world cast in frost. I came out above the wood

Where my breath left tortuous statues in the iron light.

But the valleys were draining the darkness

Till the moorline—blackening dregs of the brightening grey—

Halved the sky ahead. And I saw the horses:

Huge in the dense grey—ten together—

Megalith-still. They breathed, making no move,

With draped manes and tilted hind-hooves,

Making no sound.

I passed: not one snorted or jerked its head.

Grey silent fragments

Of a grey silent world.

I listened in emptiness on the moor-ridge.

The curlew's tear turned its edge on the silence.

Slowly detail leafed from the darkness. Then the sun

Orange, red, red erupted

Silently, and splitting to its core tore and flung cloud,

Shook the gulf open, showed blue,

And the big planets hanging—

I turned

Stumbling in the fever of a dream, down towards

The dark woods, from the kindling tops,

And came to the horses.

                                            There, still they stood,

But now steaming and glistening under the flow of light,

Their draped stone manes, their tilted hind-hooves

Stirring under a thaw while all around them

The frost showed its fires. But still they made no sound.

Not one snorted or stamped,

Their hung heads patient as the horizons,

High over valleys, in the red levelling rays—

In din of the crowded streets, going among the years, the faces,

May I still meet my memory in so lonely a place

Between the streams and the red clouds, hearing curlews,

Hearing the horizons endure.

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My Wednesday had some annoyances, though it started nicely enough, chatting with two of my high school friends. It was hotter than originally predicted, though at least it didn't hit 90. I had my annual mammogram after lunch, which went smoothly although I won't get the actual results for a week, then I went to Bellevue to pick up a prescription that CVS had told me was ready (in fact they told me it was the last day I could pick it up), then told me when I arrived that it was not in fact there. So we had to kill half an hour waiting for them to slap a label on a container and went to Belle Pastry around the corner for chocolate mousse cake. 

I missed most of both the Mariners and Orioles games while we were out, which I guess is just as well in the case of the latter though they were winning for a while before we got home, and it was more important to me that Seattle win than that I see it. We had gnocchi with Trader Joe's excellent Limone Alfredo sauce for dinner and now we're watching Thunderbolts on Disney+, which has some flaws but lets Geraldine Viswanathan do some fun stuff and has a lovely Yelena-and-Alexei dynamic that gives David Harbour and Florence Pugh some beautiful moments. Some Equestrian Madness from the Washington Midsummer Renaissance Faire: