Verse Thursday Courtesy of Bonnitta Roy

A Poem with a Happy Ending
For Spider Peg

I.

They say you’re in some kind of trouble.
Now, I know for a fact
There are two kinds of trouble.
Good kinds, and bad ones.
But I never developed the knack
Of telling for sure
The difference.

I am the kind
When it comes,
Or calls… sometimes you get “the call”
To go there, in a rushing sort of way
To see what the trouble is,
That’s got me out of bed again
(Cause trouble comes mostly then.)

In my neck of the woods
Trouble usually means
A dog fight or a cat spat
A coyote (or poacher)
Taking down a deer
Or some drunk gone off the road
And hung up in a tree.

Now if you know what I mean
These are not all bad troubles.
I have met friends this way.
I have seen the deeply naked
Eye of killers
And the softly retreating
Eye of the dying.

“Things have to die,” my mother said
“Or else we’d just have too many of them.”
Therein lies the trouble, I suppose.
Too many things to hold on to
And we want to hold on to
Them
Forever.

II.

One night,
Roused from sleep under a shiva moon,
I got the call.
“Come quick. Remi’s having
Some kind of trouble.”
In my truck, I drove the
Twenty miles to get to him.

Remington – my behemoth of a horse
A handsome thoroughbred, now
Very old, and riddled with his troubles.
Distressed in many ways,
He seemed to be dying.
“What kind of trouble is this one,
My wonderful friend?”
I asked, of him, and of the night.

I sat in a corner of his stall.
He roared a deep dark sigh that smelled of blood and urine,
Pounded the stall floor several times,
And gently- so gently that I could not
Recall him as a horse-
Laid down, his tremendous head
Gentling into my lap.

His heavy head fit there
Like the baby Christ in his manger
Half in, half out.
His huge eye stared wantingly
Into my own depths.
And I gave him back nothing.
Not kindness, nor sorrow, nor comforting words.

Nothing but my presence.
As if by merely being there
To raise his skull up from the
Soiled bedding,
Was the point of having come
To visit with him and his trouble
This late night.

His huge eye retreated, softly
Into some cavernous region
Behind his skull.
And chased his tongue out
Where it stilled itself against
My thigh
Like a dying flounder.

A terrific stillness followed.
And I did nothing.
I did not move, or weep, or try
To think of better days
When we rode like lightning
Dangerously across the endless fields
Like the mounted warriors of Armageddon.

Then he startled himself
And woke up from the dead
And with the same uncanny gentleness
Stood up, and gave a good shaking
To the wearied body he had abandoned
For a long long long – moment.
And got on with eating his hay.

On the way back
In my truck
The strangest thing happened.
Whatever it was that had left him
And crossed, so to speak
Where bodies do not follow
Scooped me up with it.

And I rode this disembodied thing
Into the farthest heavens,
From which vantage point
I could see my earthly self
Motoring along the country roads
With all of space and time
Still down there, but now within me.

I, the universe, bellowed a primordial laugh
That announced
An extreme kind of trouble!
At times I wonder how that
Was heard in the earthly realm.
Did it rouse the embodied beings
Sleeping there
Under their shiva moon?

III.

Dearest, warmest, wondrous, wisest Spider Peg,

I know you know of such things:
Horses risen from the dead
And humans given wings.
It is as if we’ve rode the same horse
Or borrowed that same pair of wings
From time to time
To rise above the realm
Of mere mortals and men.

Don’t get me wrong.
I know you love it here
As I do.
I know you love the hoof-pocked
Path through the prairies
As the trouble-riddled roads
Of our minds.

Terrible and terrific
Places, where the she-devil dances
Beneath a haloed moon
Giving rise to all that comes forward
Through blood, excrement and tears
Like the living dead on Halloween.

Here.
But never for too long.
Or else there’d be too many of us!
Too long, would be unbearable.
Coyote knows well enough
When to move on.

Here today.
Gone tomorrow.

It’s all a vanishing act.

One day
I shall again ride as you do now
On that horse spirit,
To be swept away deep into the sun
Where we were born out of
Some kind of trouble.
Unlike Icarus
Without the vanity of such things
As wings made of wax

Neigh, on wings of pure laughter
I will see you soar! As

the eagle
who is you
who is she
who is me.

Bonnitta tells me that she wrote this poem, which recounts a true story, the night she was told that a friend had only days to live. This friend was a cowgirl/ rancher growing up and a philosopher/ psychologist who integrated Native American spiritual practices into modern methodologies of meaning. As she was dying, her family emailed out to inform friends and welcomed comments. Bonnitta wrote through the night (after the incident reported in the poem).  She says, “the poem just came to me “out of know-where.”  Her friend died that night, and Bonnitta never knew for sure if she received the poem …