Archive of New Mexico Poetry – Victoria Edwards Tester

First Horses, 1519

We were thrown into the sea
at the Horse Latitudes.

Our manes spit foam at the moon, our hooves
plowed salt from our lungs

until we heard the last syllable
of the grieving Arab’s lullaby.

Then we rolled like opened wooden chests over
the black floor of the Atlantic,

we were death looking for a white sail.

Those of us who lived
went through the green door  of a New World

where we where slaves.
Gentled men and women who’d forgotten
their own secrets.

We kept what we forgot locked in our eyes and we rode into cornfields,

into war, under the heavy thighs
of men we wore like silver idols.

Among the first laws of New Spain, it was ordained
no Indian could ride us.

We heard them tell the Indians we were immortal.

That we were the lower part of a riding God,
and they must build corrals to hold us back

from devouring their human flesh.

The Indians watched our captors ride us with saddles
inlaid with silver and gold,

watched as our captors slept with us like silken women,
ran their tongues over the lashes of our velvet eyes,
made us beds next to their own.

The Indians went to war with us.

They burned us alive, or filled
us with arrows and ate the flesh from our necks
and left us among the gramma grasses.

When the first Apache chose one of our fastest
and rode away into thorns and pink hills,

the enemies of our enemies became our friends.

We loved those men who spoke into our manes
with sounds that had no word for king

and many for wind.

They sweated on us and rubbed our sweat
onto their bodies
until we were one.

They raced us and cast cords around our necks.

When winter weakened us they trapped us
in canyons or against bluffs

where our eyes rolled with the memory of salt waves.

They breathed into our nostrils until our spirits mingled,
and we gave them our speed and flesh
in exchange for their language
of wind.

Later, the horse-whisperers stepped forward, they were men
who were horses, too, of all colors. We chose them

for our leaders, we
made them forget they were men
whose descendants would be born
inside fences, hospitals.

They almost made us forget the lightless bottom of the sea,

where our deaths are still calling like white sails.

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Otter

Once we were saints, not ghosts, on this river. We leapt one thousand
times over the yelping coyote’s back until he ran for cover.

We were tender with our own. Tucking them like brown nests among the cattails
and reading the tracks of wolves and lions in the wind through old cottonwoods.

We lived through centuries, more joy than the sun’s tassels in rusted
traps sprung on the heaviness
of rotten leaves.

The rivers flowed with fish whose bodies held the mysteries of God’s
blindness. We ate those fish and would not see the time of gentleness
was over–

We await our resurrection in the wild
eyes of the Holy One.

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Rain

I’ll fall where I damn well please.

And I please over the wild grasses and their doves. Over cornfields,
and horses that are padlocked, and horses carrying away their own
thieves.

Over mesquite, orchards.
Jails, cemeteries, banks, sidewalks, gallows. Valleys wide as summer.

Over the candlelit dinners of the governors and the dark camps of
fugitives. Over murder, and birth.

Over the tall straight lines of clapboard houses. Like whiskey on the
faces of good women.

Because I’m against chastity. Against holding out, playing favorites.
I’m for the desert crocus that opens to any hummingbird’s clear
passion.

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Mountain Lion, 1936

I was his shadow. The one Ben Lily hoped to kill that morning he died
in the poorhouse in Silver City.

I escaped, ran free from his dogs who were mourning against the adobe
wall, the iron of my blood lost to their tongues.

I was his shadow. He first saw me in the Louisiana canebrakes and
killed my brother the black bear with a pocketknife.

That was fifty years ago. He followed that hawk bothering his wife he
called that daughter of Gomorrah’s chickens, and kept going.

He tracked me state to state across the west. Mountain to mountain.
Killed thousands of bears, hundreds of lions. Saw my golden twin
sister swaying

in the highest branch of a tall pine and shot her paw. Drilled her
heart when she was halfway
to the ground.

I was his shadow. He forgot his money paid by grateful ranchers in
banks across Texas and New Mexico. Wrote checks on the fragments of
bone
for what he wanted, maybe once a year, in December.

He slept with his dogs beneath dried leaves. They unburied what I
killed, cooked it in fire for the strength to hound me over rocks,
pine needles.

Rested only on days Lily suspected were Sundays. Then he sat and read
his Bible. Walked solemn through pages of desert valleys, deer and
blue water.

I called him The Judge.
He called me The Devil.
Because I could wreak evil in these pinon and juniper hills and was
not ashamed. He never stopped his human talking, kept it up like a
prayer. I called him Shame.

He called me Cain. On nights he slept I crept close to his face.
Studied it and almost loved him like a brother. On his forehead there
was a mark like a smoke stain on an altar.

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About the Poet
Victoria Edwards Tester is a resident of southern New Mexico, who lives near Silver City. She is a poet, writer and teacher. These poems are from her manuscript The Miracles of Sainted Earth, (University of New Mexico Press, 2002).

• First Horses, 1519
• Otter
• Rain
• Mountain Lion, 1936