Garrons in the Pale Paddock 

Pales in the paddock, ten thick-necked garrons
turn kindly pony eyes to the wind, teats leaking 
fatty milks. Stout steeds. Switched by the withy 
to work. Now, they rout the marram grass and stare. 
One pony stalwartly chews nothing at all.
In a funnel of unguents, the pony is a stocky sun.
Burn the unguents from your waxy mane 
and from between your enormous muddy eyes.
Let’s braid long grass to make a halter for his head.
And weave a thick girth and a wide, grass saddle pad. 
His bit is also grass but bound with cordage.
Let’s braid its mane into one-hundred plaits, 
then twist them into glossy chestnut buds. 
Then, one fat fragrant braid of his variegated tail. 
A pony festooned in marram grass driven down 
the sea cliff droveway. Several ponies on the cliff, 
several suns wrapped in living ponymeat.  
Off with your pony lendings and pop your winding worms!
This greasy kingdom burns low and warm.
The ice in the sky turns the mountains cold pink. 
All the world is Nowhere now, and it is lovely here,
walking on the edge, the sky dark as a pony’s eye,  
collection-globe of world-silt. The pony chews and blinks.
Dumb ponies! When the children tire of their mates, 
they’ll walk you through the slaughter gates!

ξ

Seagate Cliff

Down the hard path to the swinging gate 
swung open to the sea, the seagate hinged 
to fling or flee where the ocean scours the rocks, 
where a Scandonavian King sat suspended —
in a weather of upspray and salted-rain.
King? Are the switches still soft and nigh?  
A quick fox lopes through sere and rills, 
sharp-tipped quills; jackal-like jonquils
tremble in the common-brained meadow.
Though the sun comes down in solar pleats
and weird, spindly wire-rays — you are cold.
Did it settle where the white thorn blows?  
To wither and wilt all generational afterones? 
And the thistle found in the gannet’s throat? 
King, a thistle will choke a water bird to death.
I, too, wandered the whale’s way in winter.
Rowed the swan’s road as empty and idle and vain.
The soil is thin from where we come; our sea 
wind strips the grasses of their minerals
and eats the blue casings from our veins. 
How many long bones underneath our feet?
I know some of them as kin. We put stones
on our Mother’s eyes and wrapped our Father
in a bag of skin. We come from a dark shelf, 
bloody waters, black woods, isles, the fens. 
Come kill my horses and bury them with me.
There, I will ride them in the loam and the dirt 
to the home-hearth, the center-place, to a new land,
in the stranger-earth, in a black soil-sea.
Bury me in a hole, surrounded by my things. 

ξ

Regan Good has published two books of poetry, The Atlantic House (2011) and The Needle (2020). She teaches writing at the Pratt School of Architecture and lives in Brooklyn, New York, where she was born.