“Yours is the name the leaves chatter
at the edge of the unrabbited woods.”
“Dear One Absent This Long While,”
—Lisa Olstein
1. If tomorrow you awaken as a horse, would you love horses as much as you do now?
1b. That is: would existing as a horse eventually make too familiar (and therefore too common) the horse to (in) you?
1c. That is: would living as a horse, after living as a human, mean you’d be a horse that would never know completely what it means to be a horse?
1d. Then: you, your own elusive self. A form of heaven and exile.
2. To have existed as a poet: would the elusive love you once had for horses become the elusive love you’d now have for human language?
2b. Would you ache for the language in which you once ached for horses?
3. To have existed as a poet: the realization horses were never a metaphor or stand-in for greater truths.
3b. Horse as beauty and truth: this mattered as a human. You doubt it will when you are a horse.
4. To have existed as a Jew: God, forgive {me} for the prayer {I} wished {to become}.
5. Hooved hotline bling is the hotheaded refusal of saddle, bridle, fences, borders.
5b. No drum, no orchestra, no sound machine can stand-in for the music that hooves become.
5c. You are now reading this aloud when your husband wanders over to your desk. The cat is at your feet, meowing for food. You mouth without sound: this is not a betrayal.
6. If tomorrow you’re reborn a pair of bloody hooves, would you remember shivering on some cold day in Iceland watching a wild range of them (now you) running on frostbitten land, beneath a grey sky that hid all doubt and limits, the easy coming and going of them-you, tossing matted manes into ungloved hands, the open expanse of such unaffected affection while you stood there with a happiness that birthed another self, dwelling in your heart of another planet?
7. Burial of your old bones: you wouldn’t return to them.
7b. To have existed as a Jew: God, forgive {me} for forgetting Kaddish, the stones {I} will not lay on the graves of those {I} once loved. Forgive {me} for rotting in an open wilderness, when {I} die, for feeding the wolves and the vultures, for the horses who carry {my} bones only in their memories.
8. Nor taking tundra to task with pick-axe, with magnifying glass just to find evidence of human you, to leave behind first person and all its little dreams and all its little deaths.
9. You’d become the poems trampling the pages, the language you can’t speak. You’d speak of today, only. Present-present-present you.
9b. It’s your husband’s fault, really. You only heard the horses for real since you’ve been with him. They pour out of his mouth into yours.
9c. He’s still up, pretending to read the book you gave him years ago, a scientific book on interpreting horse behaviors.
10. What if you lost the love you have {now}.
10b. So you turn your husband into a horse.
10c. So he’s staring at you with his big horse eyes. He mouths: who will tell our families?
10d. It’s a one-shot deal. The cat is still a cat meowing for food.
10e. Since you can’t write apology emails, or call to say you are horses now, you nudge him down six flights of stairs. This is the hard part. Walking on four legs for the first time, navigating your longer bodies around sharp turns of narrow, NYC apartment staircases.
10f. No one, you horse-hope, will bat an eye at two horses trotting down Queens Boulevard under the protection of the bridge from the elevated 7 Train.
10g. No horse apology for turning him into a horse.
10h. The horizon: uncitied & hoofed-heavy.
11. The horizon: all the horses he breathes into you.
12. The horizon: your eyes red and opened.
13: The horizon: how hooves will always uproot tomorrow.
13b. How wide and unkind she is, all that is horse-living. How unpredictable and precarious the days you know not as days anymore, but continuous breathing.
13c. Tomorrow: that he is always near you.
13d. Will you remember. Will you remember how lonely the futures would have been if humans would have lived without horses? Futures you now make present. Take them. Take them, oh, strange, new hooveheart awakened.