A few months ago I was invited to write a piece for the catalogue of the Horse exhibition at Everard Read Circa gallery in Rosebank. The thought of venturing into cree-ha-tive writing was daunting, but I decided to dive right in. When I saw the end result – more a coffee table book than catalogue, filled with the most exquisite images – I almost platzed with joy and disbelief. What an honour.
Appaloosa, pommel, fetlock and girth – the secret words of the horse-struck child startle in my head the moment I clap eyes on him. Him. Her. The head has no body so it is hard to know. His her story is told by the plate glass and barbed fever trees. He her and me; we lock eyes, woman to prisoner and I feel the dizzy stirrings of ages old Horse love.
Horse is everywhere, the subject of my puerile desire flirts, with switching tail and bronze turd. She prances through flickered images of naked girl and Max Factor lips, changing her pace from canter to gallop and my heart judders.
I want to stay forever.
But he calls me on and I smell him now, hormonal sweat and glowing flank. The puppy-sweet soft breath from twitching muzzle. If I lean back I will fall into him and he will carry me. As no man has ever carried me.
I reach out to touch him and he is warm on cold steel; I turn and he is naked, then yearning from the walls as many-headed herd. He is mobile, metal twisted, filled with light and humour. She is shadows cast across white pages. He is donkey. She spreads her lovely bones and flies with wings of rib and gristle high above the fields and paddocks of my tender years.
And now she is at my feet, struggling with fawning hooves dancing yet shuffling. I want her to stop struggling but I’m afraid that if she does… if she does she will stop dancing. I dare not look away. But now I hear them see them from the corner of my eye; the dust is rising, casting a loud pall over the ochre heath. They are coming. Horse and Horse and Horse.
I am there.
Outside, life and cars and painters. I blink and turn and back. Recycled horses nod to drivers and passers-by as childhood scented hay skitters across the way. Oh oh oh the longing is deep now. But I cannot continue without circling the one-stumped soldier who owes his life to the drowning Horse; his tinpot form a testament to the quirks and accidental heroics of war.
I inhale the warrior woman’s saddle then up the helter-skelter path I follow the beat of his rumbling hooves, into the dancing lights where a table is laid with crop and sugar: treats for my Horse. I meet the gods who recreated him, who use their bodies to carry him as he has carried us across gentle fields and ever outward-leaning horizons. I see her stripped bare to sacrament – three times offered. Always taken.
I am stripped bare. I talk and I move, yet as my great lungs heave, I stretch to four hoofed corners, my head nodding and bowing without submission. My tail whisks, lazily.