Ice Wager

Johannes Franciscus Hoppenbrouwers

 The Ice Wager

Snowscape. Shod in tailor’s irons,
Red-hot, with my poundage of weights,
I test the ice of our latest year.
Half the world is out on skates

And the other half watches. Avercamp
Or Brueghel bring the wild duck
Out of the skies, and crowd the river
With yellow leggings, anoraks,

Tobogganing children, and those dogs
More loved around here than people—
The blind or the lonely. Winter trees
Turn gelid in the freezing fog,

The roads are churned to slushy meal
By the horses. Zigzags, figures of eight
Complete the picture. But it is real,
Our wager, so place your bet

With the notary on the bank,
Impartial witness. Hollow rumblings
Out on the ice—the iron quoits,
The games in progress. Will it crumble, 

Our little world, or will it hold?
Upriver from the Netherlands’
Oceangoing space, a man skates in,
A traveller, his clasped hands

Behind his back, his earflaps
Dangling. Has it fallen through,
Our worldview? But he brings no news.
Our mulled wine, our potato schnapps

Are all that concern him. Hurdy-gurdies,
Monkey dances. The Good, the True
Are beyond him, where he is travelling to.
It is down, again, to me and you,

Tonight, when I come off the ice
Which, needless to say, has never cracked
In centuries of changing skies,
To carry out the mandatory acts,

Traditional, for the time of year—
Banquets where the loser pays,
White tablecloths for the ice-floes
Junketing on, in hope and fear.

Harry Clifton 

The Holding Centre: Selected Poems 

 

Has the ice cracked? 

Has our worldview collapsed? 

Will our little world crumble?

I love the questions. Are we ready to make a wager on our answers?

 

 

Evening Snow

     

Evening snowfall, with the faint dry crunch
Of straw that stable horses twist and munch.

Kyukoko

fr. A Net of Fireflies
translated by Harold Stewart

Snowfall - one of my favourite things. The translation of this haiku might not be the best, but the image and the subject matter still do it for me. It intrigues me how something cold can also give off such a quality of warmth - of covering and insulating. How that works I don't know.

Horseman in Rain

Unknown

Horseman in Rain

Primordial waters: clover and oat striving, water-walls,
a meshing of cords in the net of the night,
in the barbarous weave of the damp, dropping water,
a rending of water-drops, lamenting successions,
diagonal rage, cutting heaven.
Steeped in aromas, smashing the water, interposing
the roan of their gloss, like a foliage, between boulder water.
The horses gallop in water,
their vapor attending, in a lunatic milk,
a stampede of doves that hardens, like water.
Not day, but a cistern
of obdurate weather, green agitations,
where hooves join a landscape of haste
with the lapse of the rain and the bestial aroma of horses.
Blankets and pommels, clustering cloak-furs,
seedfalls of darkness
ablaze on the haunches of brimstone
that beat the considering jungle.


                         Beyond and beyond and beyond
And beyond and beyond and beyond and beyoooooond:
the horsemen demolish the rain, the horsemen
pass under the bittering hazelnut, the rain
weaves unperishing wheat in a shimmer of lustres.
Here is water's effulgence, confusion of lightning,
to spill on the leaf, here, from the noise of the gallop,
the water goes wounded to earth, without flight. 
The bridle reins dampen; branch-covered archways,
footfalls of footfalls, an herbage of darkness
in splintering starshapes, moonlike, icelike, a cyclone of horses
riddled with points like an icicle prism -
and born out of furor, the innocent fingers brim over,
the apple encompassing terror
and the terrible banners of empire, are smitten.
Pablo Neruda (translated by Ben Belitt)

What just happened?!!

What was that?

A kind of list? Of how water can fall or be smashed or be spilled, how it weaves and shimmers and spits - or this, "here is water's effulgence" (effulgence, what a great word - "a brilliant radiance, a shining forth")? I haven't come across many lists with the action and movement in this one. The horses galloping, stampeding, hooves flying - the smell and the sound of them - wonderful! This is the magic of Neruda.



 

Names of Horses

Lucy Kemp Welch

Names of Horses

All winter your brute shoulders strained against collars, padding 
and steerhide over the ash hames, to haul 
sledges of cordwood for drying through spring and summer, 
for the Glenwood stove next winter, and for the simmering range.

In April you pulled cartloads of manure to spread on the fields, 
dark manure of Holsteins, and knobs of your own clustered with oats.
All summer you mowed the grass in meadow and hayfield, the mowing machine 
clacketing beside you, while the sun walked high in the morning;

and after noon's heat, you pulled a clawed rake through the same acres, 
gathering stacks, and dragged the wagon from stack to stack, 
and the built hayrack back, uphill to the chaffy barn, 
three loads of hay a day from standing grass in the morning.

Sundays you trotted the two miles to church with the light load 
a leather quartertop buggy, and grazed in the sound of hymns. 
Generation on generation, your neck rubbed the windowsill 
of the stall, smoothing the wood as the sea smooths glass.

When you were old and lame, when your shoulders hurt bending to graze,
one October the man, who fed you and kept you, and harnessed you every morning,
led you through corn stubble to sandy ground above Eagle Pond,
and dug a hole beside you where you stood shuddering in your skin,

and lay the shotgun's muzzle in the boneless hollow behind your ear,
and fired the slug into your brain, and felled you into your grave, 
shoveling sand to cover you, setting goldenrod upright above you,
where by next summer a dent in the ground made your monument.

For a hundred and fifty years, in the Pasture of dead horses,
roots of pine trees pushed through the pale curves of your ribs,
yellow blossoms flourished above you in autumn, and in winter
frost heaved your bones in the ground - old toilers, soil makers:

O Roger, Mackerel, Riley, Ned, Nellie, Chester, Lady Ghost.

Donald Hall




So beautiful. Where do I begin? Everything about this poem is beautiful. It encompasses a lifespan of work: "All Winter your brute shoulders strained against collars", "In April you pulled cartloads", "All summer you mowed the grass in meadow and hayfield", "Sundays you trotted the two miles to church", "in the mornings", "and after noon's heat". Within the pattern of work is a relationship not specifically mentioned but as potent a presence as I've ever read. The horse and the man. Their relationship carries the farm forward. There's no question that the horse serves the man's needs, and this is perhaps what makes the poem so moving. Even without direct praise, the catalogue of the horse's work clearly expresses respect. He/she has an honoured place in the centre of the man's life. "You strained", "you pulled", "you mowed", the poem is written not to us, but to the horse, who has a name - a name - a thing that shows a recognition of individuality, of worth, and of relationship. Layer after layer the details make a life for both a horse and a man. And time. Time repeating, cycling, renewing, building. Time as a familiar setting, a rhythm. My favourite line in the whole poem -  "Generation on generation, your neck rubbed the windowsill of the stall, smoothing the wood as the sea smooths glass." 

The end of the horse's life is a terrible moment. I don't know who I feel worse for, the horse or the man. And yet, even here I read respect. The man sees his age and pain and knows the time has come. This also is part of the pattern. And here, too, the seasons do their work. Summer makes the horse a monument, blossoms are his canopy in Autumn, and the winter frost heaves his bones. There is a brutal beauty even in this.
 

*For anyone who likes to read about old farming ways, here are a few excellent Rural Memoirs:

"Corderoy", Adrian Bell (the first of a trilogy)
"Farmer's Glory", A.G. Street
"Just Across the Fields", Humphrey Phelps
"Farm of My Childhood: 1925-1941", Mary Roberts (this one has a lot about horses)