Togara Muzanenhamo

At first the stubborn growth resists him, till each stroke
is fluently flung to clear the knee-high grass, his task
down to an art, the pendulous swing of knees slightly
giving, his right arm catching the sun wet off the blade.

All day the work, shuffling steps into shuffled clearings,
beetles and crickets rising off cordite clicks sparking
off stone, bearded chin sequinned with sweat. The heat
seems not to bother him, but steels his concentration

deep in the trials of his faith. Why the sun rises and falls,
why his jaundiced wife believes God will save them all,
is just as unclear as why his newborn's unfinished death
hangs heavy on every dawn. In the music of his labour,

each composed thresh throws slashed grass to sunlight,
each mastered stroke floats timed beneath the weight
of the sun burning deep into his heart, the mastered art
of his arm fluent with the song the hours constantly sing.
...

He will not understand her fascination
with rain, these summer months of water
that somehow keep the money coming in,
paying for the nurses his granddaughter

has slowly learnt to trust. Now all the good
help is gone, he feels he can spot liars
with one look; and if he could, he would
take care of her himself. All these prayers

for a new body! She doesn't understand
the joke, but simply stares out the window
where an old broken-down tractor stands

in the backyard, grass screaming out of
worn sprockets, joints rusting above slow
gulfs of shadow shot wild with foxglove.
...

walk down and enter history,
smoke white breeze over trilby
shadow, warm September air.
Corrugated roofs skirt over
iron railings, linking sunlight
store to store. Avenues run
wide as riverbeds cut straight,
ironed flat by the wind, sun
and rain. With the glare it's
almost a dated photograph
from 1922, stiff grey streets,
the growing town dwarfed
by the thought of surrounding
land, distant hills bounding
north. Now bitumen stands
thick where dark grit sands
absorbed sunlight, shaded
gables shrinking into heat,
old colonial names - faded
but blocked out in concrete -
speak like scripts on graves,
and not one car in sight, nor
a lone hum, but rustling leaves
scuttling by to a chorus caw
of crows, the town deep in
slumber, its people locked in
dreams they hardly remember
when they wake past noon -
the dry mists of September
turning through the small town.
...

Naked and afraid, the girl doubled up with a shrill
that filled the rear-view, the red sun thick off her hair,
her lips peeled back over teeth clenched on tails of air
shredded thin by speed. A rush of rich carmine silt ran
swollen under the bridge, the dry knock of the wheel
pitching the battered Hilux over the ungraded road.
Again her face resurfaced, alone in the mirror, the strain
of the breech birth tightening her breath, the road
rolling stoically to its cruel end where a dirt-strip took
us up to a quiet clinic set at the foot of the mountain.
There, blood and limb turned cold between her thighs.
The drive back home was all silver light and tussock
grass fields, low heavy gears moaning to the turn-off -
the road speckled black, the river's bruised serigraph
woven wet with the brisk evening flight of alderflies.
...

"In about 70 years, you can place my body here"
Eddie Arcaro, the reinterment of Isaac Murphy, Faraway Farm, Lexington, 1967

"One more mighty plunge, and with knee, limb and hand,
I lift my horse first by a nose past the stand.
We are under the string now - the great race is done
And Salvator, Salvator, Salvator won!"
Ella Wheeler Wilcox, ‘How Salvator Won'
...

1891
Furlongs of sky curve fast over burning rails -
dirt thundering and flicking up beneath the polished clap of sweat.
At the reins, each breath draws bluntly from the sternum.
Knees in. The sun ringing loud. Pumped fists and hats tipped to wave wild
from the grandstand - a roaring applause
composed of timeless stuff: men bowed hard, given to the mane,
the short whistled cath of leather on sculpted folds of flesh.
As the sky bends out straight,
speed is held -
man and horse flat out,
the weight of flames shivering in the eyes
of rider and beast,
breaths of fire
spilling wet
off lips of the fevered crowd.
...

1955
Tangled vines breathe over cooling backs of stone,
sun-veined nut sedge bound tight over dates eroded by time.
The earth rests wired and neglected. Another summer comes to pass.
The dead lie without names here, the link of age rusted with ankle chains
running quiet into a fog of clouded musket fire.
The railroad sings loud over junkyard metal twisted by sunlight.
Beyond a trodden fence, Lexington sits forged by southern prayer -
Baptist words rising from the heart,
burdened songs sung
for the leaden-paced march into each quick-silvered twilight
reined by the whip's black hymn,
songs sung by those
who'd walked the dark
roads only to learn
to run, then ride alone.
...

1980
From
Jordan's Row
this slow silver light
stands solid in its place,
a laboured
gleam
sloping off narrow shoulders
with an unassumed grace;
rider
standing sure
and strong,
jacket and
crop
in hand,
knee-high
boots,
long
legs
plant-
ing
a
silver
stride
set firm
on the base of the American equine turf.
...

Circa 1964
Always this dream, the
immortal flick of wind,
the dark sediment caking
our mouths. Always this
feeling of time sitting flat
like crust turning soft in
our brains - the earth
wet with a dour embrace.
Wandering footfall tears
through the union of fo-
liage and sun, a breath of
earth and stone thicken-
ing with an inquisitive
charge. How do the dead
defend themselves, cross-
armed, hollow-breasted,
muscle undone by the
wet-rotting song of time.
For years we lay lost,
hugged tight by mounds
of ungoverned earth,
squat nameless blocks
knotted above our heads
till the shovel's eye sunk
its blade and tipped and
rose with pure betrayal.
...

And for a while, the darkness is new again,
the earth heavy with the ungiving spring.
Who will hear the gentle spats of rain
spit on earth and turn songs we'd forgotten to singing
hymns rooted to trees sweet
with the blood of pinioned fruit,
fruit hung from boughs, swinging
swollen and ripe, casually falling
beyond the view of this plain.
...

1967

Lucy Murphy: 1868 - 1910

The mineral sound of bone rings heavy
with each natural layer of calcium, the wind
sweeping low with Kentucky's prayers.
Paddocks and fields roll out to naked views
where troubled mares slip off to foal
the sun over fresh snow, the moon setting
again, drawing me to think of you.

In simple terms, light is inverted,
the air folded to compact earth -
the world another place, another life
where veined roots are cut blind -
the white thread of matrimonial love
severed from the jasmine bone.

And so the seat is rich, yet the throne
quiet on the template of legendary
worth, a wealth of praise bowing with
the humility of stone. And where
time sits is far divorced from the heart,
the air damp with bone set beneath
dust and snow; the matter of flesh
resolved by the earth, the matter of us
turned again, incomplete by the vogue
of time, my head in your arms forgotten,
the chalkstone dirt stretch heavy with calcium,
the track drumming hard with hoof and applause,
the grief of Kentucky's prayers, the black-foaled
stars giddy where our hearts lay
quiet in the brier-tangled shadows,
the music of unwanted distance grating loud
with what can only be
the memory of an intimate age.
...

2011
Kentucky Horse Park

The memorial stands to crown Man o' War,
Secretariat sired by distant blood,
royal stakes and garlands
trickling dew to gather
where each chestnut colt stands
proud, dawn folding back its copper hood.

The light is simple. Each quiet, warm stable
heavy with the tang of manure,
blue starlings whistling,
the air fresh with subtle
notes, perfumes and light falling
heavier and heavier on this portrait of nature

carved into art with patient hands of a dream,
a dream tended with a gardener's
care. Red iron seals the kiss
of fire rising with steam,
the farrier's wrist turning after a hiss
of heat, memories forged from water: winners

wreathed heavy with roses - each fired petal
bright as the sun. But all that's gone,
and all that's left is the fresh
perfume, the subtle
notes of brass songs over retired flesh,
the angled sun on a name etched deep in stone.
...

Before all sorts of retro disco struts or robot-moves begin,
before seventies cover songs and empty crates of champagne,
the cake comes in sparkling bright with candles from an age
blessed with every success garnered from this new life.
The colonel stands, lifting his glass. The tent's raised stage
rocked by thunder - earth and sky fast flicked with a knife-
white light drawing out the long squeal of the microphone . . .

True perfumes smell like insect repellent in this weather.
An early dinner, long birthday speeches before the thunder
landed its haunting echo, the colonel's loss of words, flute
up in the air like a crystal arum on fire against the pregnant
horizon. Once young and bell-cheeked, proud and resolute,
the colonel said to his wife, We must leave here after the rains,
because the war is coming. And so the war came -

loud with every death, dark with every monstrous fear.
No one survived, except him. Wife and son ambushed near
the border, brother silent since crossing to Mozambique,
mother buried in a bricked-up well; and when the Runde
swells, villagers can still taste the blood, the river's sick
black cream. And he remembers his wife nodding, thunder
folding over the hut, fields bright with burning cane.

So they dance, the sweet lawn dry beneath the canvas tent,
music and French wine, the whispering rain the bold servant
of old memories. And the cover songs know no family but
the large room he sleeps alone in, troubled by grieving, dead
drunk, lost in the heated valley that floods this heart - the hot
blood of men oiling his grip, the war still ruling his bed,
wet with squeals carved beneath his brother's cheekbones . . .
...

Across the service road, block-faced tractors carve fields
into narrow ridged lanes. Dust trails rise from the furrows,
curling above paddocks licked gold with windswept grass.
The vet takes off his shirt, browns his arms to the elbows;
standing back - he studies the cow's prolapsed womb,
palms level with his chest in some sort of medical prayer.

After a moment's thought, the sun beating hard on his back,
he leans in to cradle the womb with a mastered stoicism.
Gently he purges the muscle of grass and earth, rust-red water
flowing down her hocks, her head locked in the steel spasm
of the crush, eyes lost in the rolling shine of paddocks.
Pale signatures of dust scrawl the sky, the whispered strokes

vanishing into a blue canvas. In the pen, her day-old calf
springs about on giddy legs, the black calf shiny as split coal.
A whirlwind rises, stirring up dust and flamboyant petals.
Again, the gentle bath; but first a warm slap, a fresh bowl
and murmurs of song; his battered box open, needles, blades
and bottles spinning hypnotic webs of light over his elbow.

He shaves the base of the cow's tail. Slides the needle in.
He lifts the bright muscle, but pain dismantles her stance,
so he waits - blowflies glittering in the heat like emeralds,
her braced dance, swaying, gradually returning her balance.
Then, with an assured commitment, he guides the uterus in.
Everything beneath the sun gives stage to loud sequential farting,

a sherry rush of liquid courses down the vet's arm, into his
armpit, down his flank, to his work-trousers - the pale fluid
forming faint maps. Purposeful and red, a steady rain of petals
falls. The polished hum of bees bright beside the grading shed.
And as delicate as light salted by the sun, wafts of medicine
and dust ride the air with a perfume the whole scene needs.
...

Both men spat red dirt, the tractors' engines echoing off cypress
windbreaks smudged silver with heat - gears, shafts and star-wheels
circling raw motion into windrows. Dust steamed off mown grass,
fields stripped back with lizards and mice darting beneath kestrels

locked to the sky. Distant thunder drummed its black murderous
roll - diesel plumes floating thick above the spot where the drivers
stopped, disembarked and went for each other beneath the ulcerous
sky. Next morning a constable was called. At the stables mourners

stared into red earth - the blue sky drilled clean with a white sun.
Out in the field, a tractor and baler ran jettisoning bales lashed taut
with twine, the tractor simply swerving over ground where the iron
bar had been found, ruby wet with dew, where the men had fought.
...

1
The splashes were throngs of panic, accompanied by pleas of help - that
night when all calm shattered like frozen glass. We rushed out to find father
in the pool submerging himself against all resistance, wrestling with arms
trying desperately to pull him out.
...

It's wet underfoot with no paths running through the heather;
I passed a dead sheep on the peak of this moor overlooking the valley
Where the Calder flows beneath the frail cover of winter trees;
Up here, the roar of the wind fills my ears, the cold slaps my face.
...

Perhaps the road did end up somewhere. I see it now, in the grainy
photograph she took, bending away on the southern coast of Sweden;
telephone posts linked with slack wire disappearing into the countryside
where the road turns to tufted dunes.
...

The lawn was a frost-tight green waiting
For sunlight to land on its surface and turn
the temporary veil of white to sparking dew.
...

Through a palm print is the view of a field where a ruined
Church fosters a tree. The sound of the train's wheels
Clicks as I stare at the tree centered within the old stone walls -
Its branches spraying leaves out of two arched windows,
...