Hylonome Poem by Keith Shorrocks Johnson

Having too much time on my hands
A small surfeit of disposable cash
And an interest in what's hot and what's not
I subscribed to the Paris Review
Where I found a poem by Ange Mlinko.

It's called Barding and I had no ghost
Of a clue what the title meant
Or what the poem was about -
Stepping back from ‘the siren cresting
With its unsettling charms'.

No doubt this is what real poetry
IS all about - mind games for aesthetes
Designed to wake you up stickily with a start -
Like finding a bloody thoroughbred's head in your bed
Donated by a playful but insistent gangster
Who wants to put the hard word on you.

Anyhow all was not lost:
Barding or barbing is the body armour
Worn by the horses of late-medieval European knights
And when she is talking about ‘the brow
Of a chamfron [als chaffron, champion, chamfron, chamfrein, champron, and shaffron]
In a vitrine', she means the equine faceplate in a glass display case.

Thank god for Wikipedia for holding the bridle.
This gave her options, yea or neigh, to sugar-lump us with words like
Criniere, croupiere, flanchard, peytral, and caparisons
And even mention the prior history of cataphracts exemplified by
The Scythians, Sarmatians, Parthians, Achaemenids, Sakas, Armenians,
Seleucids, Pergamenes, the Sassanids, the Romans, the Goths and the Byzantines.

Anyhow, once I had the bit between my teeth
I got on to the Centauromarchy - the Lapiths vs Centaurs
Dust-up that started when the centaur Euryt(r) ion
Tried to mount the Lapith bride Hippodomia at her wedding
After he got a bit worse for wear, and Hylonome, who was the only
Female centaur at the feast, was so heart-broken

At the loss in the subsequent battle of her better half Cyllarus
That she grazed on some yew branches and auto-equicided.
Leaving Ovid to explore in his Ars Amatoria II
Hybridity itself as it illustrates putting two and two together
In "possible combinations of a number of conceptual opposites:
Natura and cultus, human and animal, male and female, love and war
And the contrasting values of lyric-elegiac and epic poetry".