the horse’s spirit dwells in its body
the way an eclipse burns in a pinholed matchbox
like the syllables inside a prayer
wind-shucked snow devils race across the snow
then a current ripples across the skin-shimmer
mane to hoof
& the horse organs— lung-bellows
& nine-pound heart
flatten as the body arrows across the field
toward the gate at the end
open to the half-frozen river
only the head heart & hooves will be buried
if it was escape that brought you here
where will you go
if you are the lone glyph that the language
of vanishing has left behind
what will you sing
At some point the empty rooms become you.
The days fall into each other.
The crickets pile up beside the gas pumps
like the husks of shattered violins.
They’re laid down with our sorry words, our five & dime apologies.
The faces around you shuttle by so fast they flicker
like heat lightning above the treeline.
At some point it all comes back to you.
The Union gunboat fires on retreating black soldiers,
instead of the charging Confederates.
At some point you give up on the missing.
At some point you’re at the mercy of what’s hidden in the heart of man.
How do you wrap your heart around that?
At some point the river gives up its bones.
for Tommy
If death is a dialogue between spirit & dust,
it is the horses who will speak for the spirit
on our behalf—
sometimes more spirit than flesh,
the way they’ll spook at a movement or a scent
that is unseen, that is either beyond us
or not there at all, a wisdom
beyond the sense of flesh, what flesh might be capable of—
the way they’ll stand at attention
in evening’s afterrain mists rising from the hot earth
& quiver as if an electric current rippled through their flank,
as if small arrows of light were constantly loosed into the starry horse sky their wet skin holds,
until you approach, until they’re sure you pose no threat.
The breath of these two just beyond the three-tiered pine fence
is quiet as the word exile
in a recitation of the Torah,
which tells us that even God is pleased
with horses, with their wind tunnel-licked form,
their riverine shine,
but they are quiet when you ask them of their maker,
who numbers their days
& ours, or about the hereafter,
because they might just know something
since fourteen of their kin were buried on a Norse longboat
with a queen, & five hundred terra cotta models
in Emperor Qin’s necropolis (beneath a ceiling painted
with heavenly bodies, Sima Qian tells us
from twenty centuries away, buried with jade & gold,
towers, even officials, amidst one hundred rivers of mercury).
But these horses say nothing about this day,
or your life, or the one brother in three
who will be locked away this year in this state—
if the stats hold,
& they will—
at Leakesville, & Central Miss, & Parchman Farm,
home to Unit 29, Mississippi’s Death Row.
And because you believe in mercy,
that if it is to exist somewhere
it must be what we can make of this moment,
that eventually you must trust your life to something
you pluck the white eyeballs
of engorged ticks from their flanks—
you lean your entire body into your thumbnail & fingernail
so they press a half-inch into this horse’s skin
to tear away the tick head
fanged in the horse flesh.
And because leaving them in the field is to give the horses back to them, you gather them in your hands
like a strange harvest
of white strawberry-sized cataracts,
carry them to a nearby rock still warm from the departed sun,
& though you understand that this is only another form of survival,
& though you understand their exile from the horse body
(because you have stood, stunned,
against a storefront window while you were frisked,
& saw in your own dark skin a lineage
that stretches back to another continent, back
to a body that body could not call his own,
back to a salt furnace, coal mine, shotgun shack with dirt floors
& forward
to a robbery beef, an assault rap,
forward to another exile:
your father’s sixty months at the Farm—
saw your own long term someday),
you heft his nine pound hammer
& strike the ticks where they lie on the rock
so the white bags burst in great sparks of horse blood,
until the rock’s as wet as the moment
of Agamemnon’s last cry.
At some point the river gives up its bones.
How do you wrap your heart around that?
At some point you’re at the mercy of what’s hidden in the heart of man.
At some point you give up on the missing.
Instead of the charging Confederates,
the Union gunboat fires on retreating black soldiers.
At some point it all comes back to you:
like heat lightning above the treeline
the faces around you shuttle by so fast they flicker;
they’re laid down with our sorry words, our five & dime apologies.
Like the husks of shattered violins
the crickets pile up beside the gas pumps.
The days fall into each other.
At some point the empty rooms become you.
Quiet as the applause of ghosts
three horses sidle up to us at the white fenceline,
one for each Alamo pyre.
Body of embers,
the way they glow, it’s said
Seguin returned a year later,
as the story goes,
unearthed bits of bone & handfuls
of ashes into a coffin, & buried it all
beneath a peach tree grove
while the bells rang out in San Fernando.
And after they’d been laid rest,
the grave was forgotten.
Just the way of the world,
we forget & don’t notice
the absence forgetting makes.
Little spaces. Like those in the dog’s paws
when you pull the cactus needles clear,
or the burnspots in the welder’s hands
where the sparks burned through the gloves.
Names drift from the earth—
like this blue smoke that follows the fireworks.
Round blue frames waiting for their faces.
An orderly cortège of blue shades
above these quiet horses,
who stay despite the explosions.
God, a courage like theirs
when all’s gone to shit,
a Thy-will-be-done faith
despite all fuckery, a faith
in the face of the world’s end.
The nuns sang in Galveston
to calm the children
during the hurricane—
sang as the water rose higher.
Sang until the children joined in.
What sense of lack says open this ground,
this is where the white lilacs go,
open the window, it’s snowing, therefore
the shadows from Sonny Stitt’s horn
bop their way down the street, a migration
like the journey of the old runes,
thorn, eth & ash et al.,
that traveled across the years, through dreams
& sacked cities
to become Old English letters,
or that of the words inside this phone,
where a bit of want bends
the letters, so experience autocorrects to corrientes (ocean
or electric currents, common, or running),
going somehow becomes gnosis—
isn’t the gnosis of going
all about loss? And it is, for all of us.
For my kin, almost all gone from Friesland, where we hail.
And it is, if it’s Frisian, the language
of our fathers & mothers
few in our family speak now.
And it is—if it’s here a hundred years ago in Denton,
where the black families of Quakertown were forced across the tracks:
houses bumped at a rattler’s pace on the rollers:
one woman, Mary Ellen, refused to leave her house,
& sat in her parlor rocking chair the whole journey,
while her Henry jogged alongside the house:
they started again with their lack,
with cuttings from their white lilac bushes.
Lilacs to lilacs, drift of lost vowels, is it grief or need that blooms in the wound opened by these distances?
Spaces made of the want they’re opened by,
by the years that fall through us soundlessly,
endlessly, like the snow outside,
white petals upon the air.
Turns out you can bet on anything—whether Monica Lewinsky or Big Bird will be mentioned in a debate, if your son will grow up to play for Manchester United. I wonder how one handicaps the chicken bingo game, or accounts for Paul the Octopus’ perfect record in choosing World Cup winners. What were the odds that the diary of the first Israeli astronaut would survive the Columbia explosion & a hundred mile freefall, so that the Kaddush blessing would be read by crickets in Palestine, Texas? Or the odds that a man who visits a courthouse in Gonzalez a hundred miles from the impact, & runs his hand over the names scratched in the wood of death row, would find his own name engraved there, the last man hung in the town? What were the odds Albert Howard was guilty? Don’t ask, the man is told when he asks. He was black, & this was a long time ago. The courthouse clock the man looks upon has never worked since. He draws a line between the name in the wood & his own. Now Albert is looking at the courthouse with different eyes. It’s strange, he says, but I almost remember now. This was my last day. The horse pulling the wagon that would take me away. The sunlight through the red dust clouding up from the street. The chime of the clock striking the hour a last time.
Du Mu looks up from a letter he’s writing to us
twelve centuries ago,
a letter edged with a description of the four hundred eighty temples of the Southern dynasties—
what they did with their idleness,
with a need they couldn’t explain.
Old friend, the same wind
that lifted the corners of the rice paper
around your hand
rifles wild white yarrow & black-eyed Susans
in the field beyond the burned church.
Here, as many empty porches & boarded windows as Southern temples.
Tractors rust to grass, county roads dissolve to gravel,
the walkers on the bridge
vanish. Where do they go,
the ones who move on without a word,
who leave toys in the back yard, utility bills on the front door?
Here, a little sunshine & a winedark spill of deer’s blood
across the county line,
orange sun-spotted pagodas
of wild tiger lilies in the ditches
off the rain-tamped white dust of Elk Chapel Road,
a straight shot to the polestar.
So much I can’t explain,
so much forgotten or unfinished,
if you can tell the two apart.
Old friend, I’ll be forgotten.
“Assume the position—
stop look & listen”
—“The What,” Notorious B.I.G. & Method Man
Because it’s not enough for your son
to have a platelet count of one hundred,
because once his bilirubin levels fall
he will have to leave the tent
of light he lies beneath, little
phosphorescent idol, neon glowworm
with capillaries & aortas & aqueducts
a thousand times more complicated
than the uncounted tracheal tubes
within the butterfly’s chrysalis,
because he will be made, one day,
to lie facedown in the street, nose & lips
to asphalt, & you can only dream the ark
of feathers, the Kevlar-stitched
cradle (even holding the half-god
by his heels & dipping him in the Styx
did not work: we are vulnerable
at the place we are held),
because beyond teaching him to raise
his hands slow, slow, to say sir
when he hears boy, there is nothing
else you can do, say his name
to the spillway pulsing with last night’s
rain, repeat his blood type
to the wind, alive now in its wounds
of petunias & honeysuckle.
Leave the last lock of his first haircut
in the empty mouth of the lone
Confederate statue in the town square.
Rub out the oracle figures in the blood
that rivulets the asphalt
from the deer hanging by its heels
your shadow, which holds the shadow
of a boy falling, the shadows
of flowers piled in the street
are falling like rain through
the bare rafters in the house
that is his future, the rafters your hands
are holding up, your hands
are counting his ribs, each rib.
after Oliver de la Paz
Place is called Horsehead Crossing,
first used by Comanches, the man in the seat
next to me said as we crossed the Pecos River,
a surveyor found hundreds of horse skulls here—
drank too deep from the river after going too hard too long.
I never know what to say back—
you know this feeling? Talking about nothing
until nothing’s enough, a way to pass the miles & hours,
one version
of Derrida’s infinite deferral
of whatever it is again, maybe trivia
shows us the limit of what we know,
marginalia
of our inattention, our haste, ghost of the god
of knowledge, who walks the desert barefoot,
an X to solve for
if it’s Charades or Pictionary,
I never know
what disclosure will suffice, credit score
or what I owe the IRS, letter I began the day
my daughter was born,
dog’s name & breed, that dog that won’t spook
’till a body acts spooked around him—
creep forward, hesitant, one hand up—
but enough about me on payday
or at the Lord’s Table
(X is a freedman who fought for the Confederates
X is the favorite flower of Pissarro’s wife
X wonders how to hallow the space in a tree
after a body’s been taken down
X once said they all have the same name & the name is lost
X said to the devil you want to see how the sausage is made? Consider my servant Job
X is listening for hoofbeats as the shades of twilight walk westward
X is the date of Juneteenth
X has opened all the secret windows & every peony in town has bloomed at once).
If heaven’s a boosted Caddy
language is the pair of tin cans
with which we’ve been listening
for the LoJack signal,
one to our ear, one held up to the air: nothing
for a while now, aside from a little static.
Nothing, at least, outside this slaughterhouse,
where I walk a picket line
some seventy years after everyone’s moved on—
doors chained shut, bone saw long quiet,
rust-seized & skull-still.
I drop by once in a while to listen for my lineage—
my grandmother’s father was a butcher in Holland,
& when the Nazis forbade the slaughter of animals—
people were eating tulip bulbs—
did it anyways. Blade to throat, wind-quick.
Once, during a search, my grandmother hid a sheep’s heart in her bed.
Boys surf the hoods of driverless cars
down the side streets of redlined neighborhoods west of here,
where last week a horse tore headstall from halter
& bolted for it, in a city
where thousands of horses once walked,
thousands a day—quicksilver glistening, mane & eye—
then they were gone.
A little light in my grandmother’s eyes, & now it’s gone.
I was a thousand miles away,
a day late & a buck short.
A week since I, with five of my cousins, carried her home—
who asked me three months ago, where, Mark,
is God in the long night.
What do you say to an unending wakefulness?
Hold what you got, Joe Tex said, today
forty-four years dead.
Hold what you got, even if you don’t know
where your heart is hid, if you’re
as haunted as heaven might be
by those forever absent,
those who didn’t make it through the gates,
as this evening sky is haunted
by the body we trace in the stars,
God or the ghost of God
ghost-riding nothing’s whip.