Silver Horses
a poem
Silver horses, do they see themselves
in the silver leaves of olive trees?
In the silver locked around my neck,
a bridle?
How long until the taming becomes familiar,
becomes nature?
Becomes inherited,
becomes heirloom?
Pets don’t really know their own names,
only the way you say it.
Silver horses,
if I let you go would you come back?
We say that we want to return to an ancestral past,
but there was a past before that.
The blood under blood
pushes blood out.
I dream of an ocean in Montana.
I dig for fragments on the rocky shore.
I find what I am looking for,
and then I find that it doesn’t matter.
It is, which is to say it has become,
an object of no value.
Some things are pure in image but not at heart.
But heart doesn’t always matter.
In a dream I spoke an apology to you into my cup of coffee,
then left it in a place you would find it.
When I wake up, I remember there is no place
I could leave my coffee where you would find it.
It feels embarrassing, that even in a dream,
I thought life could be so simple like that.
In a dream I’m in the cold basement of my childhood home,
wrapping myself in blankets.
In another dream I’m with a man who compliments another woman
on her beautiful handwriting,
which she ensures is perfectly even with the use of a ruler,
and it makes me jealous.
I know that I could make my handwriting better if I tried,
but I am not that kind of person.
At best I would purchase a ruler and never think of it again,
once I had it.
I am that kind of person; there are many words for it,
but I want to know which one you’d choose.
I see a pale pink engagement ring with a diamond corona
and wonder if I am that kind of girl.
Probably I could be, for a little bit, as I am nothing
if not anachronistic to myself, and always trying not to be.
I visit the 13th-century cloister at the art museum three times.
The decapitated statuettes of Mary and Christ stare back at me.
Stone carried across an ocean,
from Europe to America.
We never should have been able to be here, to see this,
or, I don’t know, maybe we should have.
We lose so much to time
as we survive it.
Silver horses, do they miss their docked tails?
The fragments of bone they never felt until they disappeared?
Or do they understand that there is no going back,
in this life?
The past is our mother who left us,
but we want her to eat us whole.