Two poems: A Selective History of Horses and Winter Solstice in the Tropics

Chrystal Ho

A Selective History of Horses

On a particular day in 1893, Botanic Gardens director Henry Ridley called for a horse carriage to take him to No. 2 Narcis Street, where he saw the orchid that we know today as the Vanda Miss Joaquim. According to the source of this version of the story, this orchid was a natural hybrid, which Agnes Joaquim discovered after noticing something strange amongst the plants in her garden – both of these being details that Ridley himself would have known to be untrue.  

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The first horse I remember seeing was beheaded. After referring to a hand-me-down Chinese manuscript book, Mother became so perplexed by how the shape of a horse could become this altered in just a matter of years that she left behind just the head and face of a horse floating on the page, her pencil, permanently suspended in mid-air.  

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In Maggie Smith’s ‘Poem Beginning with a Retweet’, the speaker proclaims, if you drive past horses and don’t say horses / you’re a psychopath. But of course you would, if a horse were to gallop past you, off the streets leading away from home onto the east coast parkway, finally unshackled from the heavy carriages that had given way to the rickety human-drawn rickshaws by the 1890s, except what seems to have happened was that the horses simply vanished.  

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The last time I said horses was on a low hill in the English countryside. Looking over a stacked stone fence was a horse with Black Beauty’s white forehead star, superimposed onto the glossy chestnut body of Ginger the mare, before their knees were broken, before their souls were whipped out of them, as they trudged on as cab horses in the midst of a wet and bitter London winter.  

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That was the image I used to reconstruct, the beheaded horse that Mother had left behind in my notebook: a sharp incline, outlining snout to brow, and four specks, enclosed in what could be a cage, a cramped stable box, or a tail, hanging downwards, caught within a carriage. The rest of the horses I learnt about in school can be summarily understood in two ways: three strokes of a brush dipped in ink, three scratches of a pen on paper.  

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The pictogram for a person – two strokes, two legs. Ridley, surveying the birthplace of the new orchid in Joaquim’s garden, teeming with Vanda teres and Vanda hookeriana blooms, his hands, perhaps held behind his back as he walked, his body inclined forward with interest.  

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This is not to say that the spectre of the carriage horse at the gate, swishing his tail to keep the flies away, didn’t exist, only that the rickshaw runner could not have lingered, already long gone down some winding road or unrelenting hill in a race to make enough to pay for the load he pulled behind him. 

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The lot of being human: to be an ox, to be a horse.  

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There was a time when the pictogram for horse was depicted without sharp, angular lines. Then, there was also no figure riding on the horse’s back, no suggestion of a carriage, no lashes from a whip of some kind, just a hand, carving intently, pushing and pulling against the resistance of a slab of stone to produce a sequence of curved, fluid lines. Turning the slab of stone 90 degrees anticlockwise, it is said that one can see the horse in the way the writer did.  

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Being more attuned to the featherweight of paper, I tilt my head to the right instead. The four specks on the reconstructed horse in my notebook stretch to stand on the ground as four freed feet, the enclosed curve, flicking upwards, as a tail whipped alive by the hand of the wind – though I’d like to think what the writer witnessed was also the horse’s joy.  

Winter Solstice in the Tropics  

A pack of glutinous rice balls that has spent more than six months in the freezer will necessarily crack, mid-simmer. This is not a question of if, but when, no whys, no buts.  

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That rain on winter solstice morning translates to rain at the start of the spring festival, on the other hand, is a barely tested hypothesis.  

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The sound of water flowing into a pot depends upon the volume of rain falling outside, how much the window is cracked open, if the wind howls, or whimpers, if the water is tepid as in June, or the finger-wincing cold of December.  

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Reaching out for a plastic rain umbrella, a child ponders its ridiculous potential as a parodic sunshade.  

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 City of rain: city of sheltered walkways.  

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I didn’t notice anything amiss then, when the oriole perched on the topmost branch of the leopard tree outside our window, as always. Nothing revealed how this would be his last visit, though he did pause mid-song to utter a crow’s guttural cry, before flying away.  

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Meanwhile, some long forgotten lyrics: how leaves are wings that do not know how to fly, how wings are leaves that have fallen onto the sky, as though falling itself could not also be a kind of flying.  

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As though there would ever be an answer to the everlasting squabble: whether the solstice marks the beginning of the end of a long winter, or the true start of its bitterest days.  

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 Outside, the leopard tree shrugs, and sheds its leaves.  

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There are the songs that tend to linger. The rain, flowing water, waltz of two butterflies breaking leaf cover. Evening dirge of an unknown bird, long after sundown.  

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 The leopard tree sprouts, sheds and sprouts.  

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I hadn’t realised just how much it had unravelled, it, meaning light, meaning birdsong, meaning the tree that has so quietly climbed such that the next time I look out, in hopes of meeting the oriole again, I could no longer see the teal windows of the unit opposite.  

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 After more than twenty years, I’m still searching for a way to talk about summer.  

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 A reason to cook glutinous rice balls in June: ensure frequent turnover.