A Study of Horses

after Matthew Wimberley

My father would wear bunny ears when I was young

and an old Detroit Tigers jacket every year.

We would walk around the neighborhood

like that, wretched from a day full of living

with each other. To live is to tolerate. My father

put me on the saddle and I fell off the saddle.

The man making cheeseburgers made cheeseburgers

and wrapped them in aluminum which made them better.

My shoulder was fine, but I remember my sister in the distance

galloping. My student tells me about the eventing championships

she missed class for, that she read the reading—loved

the Carson, didn’t understand the Stein. Who does? I say.

I tell her the assignment is to emulate what you cannot

understand, a voice wandering for the sake of the wandering,

or perhaps to chase precision, to study like the dark does,

as Matthew says. And so I read and wonder about the poets

I used to know before I forgot to keep knowing them.

I assign my class to write images for the sake of seeing,

and so they see as the writer like the image does for the reader.

Autumn is like this, collecting perfect fallen leaves, the ripeness

of red only for them to disintegrate anyway and to not know

what to do with the stem. A backpack in my closet

full of pine cones from everywhere there are pine cones

I have been. And poems are like this, collecting time

without knowing just what to do with the time.

To take you with me through the time

for a reason yet to be determined. I tell the student

my sister does dressage. And my student tells me

it is hard. To be human is to encounter and deal with

difficulty. My brother says he just wears a clown nose.

It’s low effort. It just works. A costume is easy

metaphorically, though anything can be. The half moon

on the horse’s head who bucked me, is it waxing

or waning? Is what comes next what can be predicted?

And should it? If I open the door and someone asks

for help and my hands are full of the past,

where do I put down the past? It is an emergency

to remember. The smell of a barn in winter.

A light in the distance. Two men in a horse costume

who can’t see where they are going but get there anyway.

Breathing is a trust exercise. Writing a poem for the sake

of not letting someone else down. A student tells me

too much about their life and I put on my clown nose

to tell them I cannot listen, though listening

is what I want to do. I provide them with resources.

In the past, I did not trust I would be breathing in the future.

I tell my student to get a therapist but bring poems

about my mental illness to workshop. Matthew says

darkness studies but he never said for what.

Does it study to be the light? When I was a child,

I fell off a horse. In between then and now

I told my students not to have neat endings,

to never tie the bow. Does my medication

study to be my hope? When I was a child

I lived with my father who I never thought

I would love enough to mourn. But time passed.

And time is like that, another thing that passes.

I didn’t pick a costume. I never got back on.