The Other Muse

Nancy Gauquier

This is not about Pegasus,
but about a dark horse
born without wings,
& banished to an island lost
in the mists of Atlantis,
not a horse born to the sun
and bright soft clouds that
will never grow pregnant
with rain, but a horse born
in the sweat of your pain,
when you are too whipped
by work, by a world that
has a God but no Goddess,
a world that worships
its mountains of gold,
but never remembers the
nightmares of its buried soul.

When you are so sick & tired
& faith has leaked out of the holes
in your dream, that one in which
you are always treading water,
& thirsty for one sip of love,
she is surrounded by ravens
who caw & shriek &
fan her with their dark wings,
shielding her from the burn
of the sun.

Though you once longed for Pegasus
to take you up into his wings,
it is no longer Pegasus
you cry out for, but
an estranged dark horse
shrouded in the dust of Sisyphus.
If you are lying exhausted
under some dead indefinable tree
on an island lost, you may open
the soft eyes of the fog to believe
she has always been there,
like a dark wave,
waiting.