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Gary LeBel

Daughter, Daughter

1. O lente, lente …

You can hear a trembling in their nickers as we approach: the night is starless, moonless too.

Not so dark
as full-on night but near it,
the measureless depth
in a horse's eye
at midnight

They canter in and out of a streetlight’s cone while circling round their fences with a thud of hooves our feet can feel. The better half of Cheiron, their shadowy presences hold enormous power yet one that’s tempered with an even greater gentleness.

We hope they’ll come near and after shying closer, they do, though still their apprehension ripples in their throats.

I pluck cool fresh greens from outside the fence and try the waters first, then I fill our daughter’s hand. “Darlin’, keep your fingers flat,” I say, “like this”, and slipping her hand in between the tines, hesitantly at first, she soon erupts with laughter at the touch of lips and whiskers.

What I desire is not merely to add to her already boundless love of natural things, but more, that she not fear the night but relish its peace and stillness, its fragrance, the liquid mystery that jells when the barely seen is touched, the grounds where living myth is born, ‘o lente, lente currite, noctis equi’. . . .

As strains of grey seep in
between the blinds, the dog sleeps on,
confident in her merit,
and what we'd speak of if we could
the dawn's cold rain inherits. . .

‘o lente, lente currite, noctis equi’ (O run slowly, slowly, horses of the night)
                           Christopher Marlow, Dr. Faustus (misquoted from Ovid)
                                        trans. by Louis Untermeyer, from Great Poems

2. One Pink Mitten

Certainly she’d have been eyeing the path and forest all the way there and back with a cat’s acuity.

She would have heard the wind blow through the pines, and no verses would have come to her bearing its transience, yet she would be venturing through the very heart of poetry. She may have asked her parents why there were so few birds about, and one of them might have explained that most had flown south for the winter. Although she’d have already known this, the little girl would have liked to have been told with the straightest of faces that they were all in their plush seats at the multiplex enjoying a movie about hapless crows.

Each brown leaf that covered the path would have been dreaming about the previous summer as the child’s own dreams passed through the soles of her sneakers, mingling with theirs.

She would have marveled at the vastness of the lake whose wavelets moved together like a thousand braided rivers, and she would have reached round behind her and taken her own in hand as she thought of it.

She’d have thrilled to watch the low, heavy clouds suddenly part as the sun reached down to switch on the lamp of an island, the last of its red and yellow leaves made bright and vivid as if freshly painted; then she would have giggled to herself as she imagined petting the tops of those distant trees like the heads of warm puppies, and getting paint on her fingers.

And the path would have led on and on as her parents seemed to know where they were going, the tall oaks guarding them like knights-errant as they walked.

The far eastern shore would be ablaze with the brisk clear light of November for which the child would need no explanation, for the isles and woodlands and browning slopes would have all have gotten dressed for the season in their fine fall clothes.

She would be listening intensely to the sounds of waves that were tugging at her ears to whisper secrets about Ebb and Flow.

And though she’d been taught in school that many trees sleep through the winter, to her, even the leafless ones will have been wide awake. The tallest pines will have creaked as they swung, saying “arrrw . . . arrrw . . .arrrw“, like that stuttering boy in her third grade class that nearly everyone mocked but her. And for the rest of the day she will have kept that thin lonesome sound in her pocket that she knows, sly one, is the best of all.

By the time they’d have reached their car, the path, the trees, the wind and the lake would all have become a part of her,

                              the inviolable slipstream of a day having swept her along with such wonder that she wouldn’t have noticed the one pink mitten she’d dropped along the way.

                 the one I’ve picked up and hung on the trailhead’s sign.

             I.
             Like Jan Vermeer’s
             sweet ear-ringed girl,
             the morning, too,
             having parted its lips,
             shows a hint of its ivories

II.
By the lakeside
under stars, within a fire’s
enclosing circle,
be still and become
a hundred centuries younger

             III.
             Go down, childe,
             from the highlands to the meadows
             trampling the hills of home
             and grasses sweet to taste,
             lead your Scythian horse there . . .

3. Three Girls Running

In amber, blonde and jet, their long straight tresses stream behind them as they jog down the sidewalk together. Their coltish frames are three bright bursts of lean and boundless energy,

            and Picasso’s girls of the Thirties that run so unabashedly free along the seashore come to mind . . .

           but I don’t wish to see them through the male gaze, but through a larger, truer lens

however arduous it may be to take that first step out of gender

           to see these three girls running as they really are, as daughters

and the world’s last and only hope,

           the same footsteps of believing that Renoir took

when with bandaged, palsied hands he immortalized Gabrielle.

With each tendon tensed and firing,
with raven manes in love with wind,
sleek Arabians run
and dream of other worlds
beyond their fences

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for all of our daughters

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About the Author

Gary LeBel is an artist-poet living in the greater Atlanta area whose poems have appeared in journals throughout the USA, the UK, Japan, and India. He believes that art, or anything else worth doing, is a life-long pilgrimage.