Calamity
The story goes:
Your horses
Your horses
Your horses
Give me those horses that bite our hands and spook and kill our
mothers and write this whole book of dead horses, dead mothers,
dead uncles, dead to our mothers, dead to our horses--
The brilliant sphere in your chest forms, splits apart, swarms
If you’re reading this you know about the horse
If you’re reading this you sent flowers to the funeral
One sound then another ambushed us. Picture a room, empty
except for its light and dust particles suspended in the light, no
one could leave the room, there would be no tomb and no casket,
we spread her ashes wherever we thought the marsh wouldn’t
swallow us up. Picture the night holding the scream of a barred
owl until it breaks open and the scream is a hole in the sky—a
horse gallops through to trample your mother into the field.
Across the night, its other sounds rush into a vacuum. I felt in the
dark for a switch to start everything right again, her body being
burned into the ashes we would spread near the marsh. I ask you
again what huckleberries are, try to taste something sweet. I
try—I do try to force the sky into a fox’s body and then make the
body and the fox a machine that throws out light. All of us need
light and all of us need dark. The negatives and positives collide
and then there’s just nothing to scream at, nothing to make a
machine. Now the field full of chrysanthemums and the
exhausted horse.
Back in the house, we make a prayer circle. We give praise to
what still remains. How still and how beautiful. How dark it all is
where we go when no one is looking.
Your horses
Your horses
Your horses
Give me those horses that bite our hands and spook and kill our
mothers and write this whole book of dead horses, dead mothers,
dead uncles, dead to our mothers, dead to our horses--
The brilliant sphere in your chest forms, splits apart, swarms
If you’re reading this you know about the horse
If you’re reading this you sent flowers to the funeral
One sound then another ambushed us. Picture a room, empty
except for its light and dust particles suspended in the light, no
one could leave the room, there would be no tomb and no casket,
we spread her ashes wherever we thought the marsh wouldn’t
swallow us up. Picture the night holding the scream of a barred
owl until it breaks open and the scream is a hole in the sky—a
horse gallops through to trample your mother into the field.
Across the night, its other sounds rush into a vacuum. I felt in the
dark for a switch to start everything right again, her body being
burned into the ashes we would spread near the marsh. I ask you
again what huckleberries are, try to taste something sweet. I
try—I do try to force the sky into a fox’s body and then make the
body and the fox a machine that throws out light. All of us need
light and all of us need dark. The negatives and positives collide
and then there’s just nothing to scream at, nothing to make a
machine. Now the field full of chrysanthemums and the
exhausted horse.
Back in the house, we make a prayer circle. We give praise to
what still remains. How still and how beautiful. How dark it all is
where we go when no one is looking.