Maatstaf. Jaargang 33

[p. 101]

Tess Gallagher
Gedichten

His Shining Helmet; Its Horsehair Crest

I was reading the novel
about a war fought on horseback, reading
with the pleasure of a child given horror as
splendor. The moment came when
the soldier rose in his saddle and
the rim of the saddle was shorn
away. There the story broke off.
Then the survey of fallen comrades and
the field trampled around those with
‘wounds to the head and breast’. Strange
how I thought of the horses during
these tinted portraits, the horses, mentioned
only as ‘he rode,’ ‘his mount
stumbled,’ or ‘he bent from
the saddle to retrieve the standard, then
galloped on’.

I close the book and see then
the one they did not speak of - the one
wounded in the fase, the one
with his hand caught in the mane of
his horse, which lies beside and
over him, its eyes still open and its breath
a soft plunging to which the novelist
would add a ‘light rain’ or
‘a distant thunder of cannons’.

But in the closed book, this
is the long moment I look into - the future
in which the wounds, as they say in the manual,
will be ‘non-specific, though
fatal’. How far
from the single admonition in the Hittite cavalry
instructions, simply to: ‘Kill
the horse.’

[p. 102]

The Hat

My father is going to divide
his land. He telephones to say
there are four pieces of paper in
the hat. He's going to draw for
me. ‘You don't live forever,’ he
says. When he's dead, he says,
then I'll have something. He has
put his hand into the hat, has picked
out my lot, my portion. And I know
before long, he'll see to it
I have what's coming to me. As
for the hat - it too goes
where it's taken.