Bach's Mare
by Philip Dacey

Bach’s unaccompanied third cello suite
accompanies me going to feed the horse.
My neighbor’s, at the fence. An open door
lets whinnies and the sounds of Yo-Yo Ma
mix in my ear, incongruous duet
until Babe’s lower jaw starts working back
and forth in such a way to chew the windfalls,
her rhythm matching perfectly the bow’s,
that I wonder if she didn’t go to Juilliard.

The passage--cascade of arpeggio,
long, tumbling note on top of note--suggests,
as juice and green saliva thickly drip,
a harvest yield, its cornucopian pour,
and mouth and ear become close cousins, twins,
the mouth hearing the notes it eats, the ear
eating the apples out of the air they ride.

The bay mare’s well-groomed hide gleams reddish-brown
in the sun, very color of a spotlit cello,
the sides of both animal and instrument
curved the same, the swell that of plumping fruit.

Now Bach gets on the horse, and Yo-Yo, too,
legs straddling her as cellists straddle cellos.
Babe snorts, the passengers unfamiliar,
and charges off at high speed, the musicians thrilled,
Bach bareback and Yo-Yo yipping, “Hi-Yo,”
the courante up and running as breakneck as
these three away across the pasture like some
diminishing chord, though by the time I’m indoors
it’s the solemn sarabande that accompanies
my task’s completion: washing the sticky, green
(not to say baroque) slime from my hands.

This poem originally appeared in Free Verse Magazine