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5 May 2023
Jane
Zwart
Full Moon
Broken Centaur
After Robert Muybridge
and an unknown Greek
(c.530 BC)
Legs beneath barrel, the bloodstock floats
in some frames, not one hoof to earth:
I think often of Muybridge’s pictures.
Not one hoof to earth.
But a broken centaur,
no GIF, no gallop, less than a hand high, six legs
short a horse and rider, is really a bronze
lolly on a steel swizzle stick, less Pegasus
than peg-leg. Did I think he floated?
Back limbs snapped at the gaskins, front
at the chestnut, he rides a pole; he clears
this shelf like cobs clear carousels’ turntable
floors. No object card says who broke
this chiron. But next to his legs, metal
in a soapdish: cast of runt pencil, cast of bent
straw, cast of Luckies smoked to the quick.
Behind the poem...
The subject of the poem is a photo of a small bronze statuette – a centaur, none of its legs intact – tweeted by an account I follow on Twitter. Struck by the workaround (a single peg-leg), I was a little haunted, too, by how this sculpture floats, heavily; almost like the stop-motion photographs Robert Muybridge took of a horse galloping: proof that all of the creature’s hooves leave the ground when it runs.