Horse Carpaccio

One remainder bin
at McNally Jackson was still full of straw
from the time Bess had wrangled a commercial tie-in

with the Grain and Feed Association. If there’s a flaw
in the argument for heavy hors d’oeuvres
it’s surely horse meat raw

as the sciatic nerve
that runs from Parma to Palermo.
‘Lucretius knew a great poem embodies a swerve,’

Bess had ventured, ‘as a chariot horse must reaffirm
its first refusal on the field
against the Parthians.’ The squirm

of a peeled
shrimp offered by a Lufthansa flugbegleiter.
American Grain and Feed no longer gave good yield

and were skittish about being underwriters
of this beano for Bess’s New and Selected Poems.
She was now visibly slighter

than when she’d slow-danced a jeroboam
of Moet & Chandon
through the bookstore. Slow-danced a jeroboam

while singing Jacques Brel’s Quand on
n’a que l’amour.
Partly because she was used to being abandoned

she favoured a mare that was an easy doer
and could be turned out without being coddled.
‘A whole other league from Brassens and Aznavour

though they all modelled
themselves on your fellow flugbegleiter, J.S. Bach.’
Even as American Grain and Feed dawdled

another woodcock
broke cover. ‘Brel? Must be a Belgian name.
I do know a “gambrel” refers to both a horse’s hock

and a hook for hanging game.’
That had been at the Horse Carpaccio launch.
Partly because she herself was playing a long game

Bess had indeed become a byword for staunch.
Any page she’d written since was not just sliced thin
but sliced thin from her own haunch.