the columbia review
Last year, I sent a picture of sheriff’s horses at the Stockyards to a girlfriend in Seattle. There were brick roads and buildings built to look like the Old West when horses and carriages pulled by horses were the only way around. They really sold us on the whole thing—this being when my mom was still alive and wanted out of the house even though it meant being pushed around in a wheelchair. To her, the horses were so tall and unbelievable then. She envied their legs and their appetites and she appreciated with envy my legs and my appetites. When the check came at the Stockyard’s BBQ joint it was December. My girlfriend demanded I take her there in the future and she wanted Texas Toast especially with her meat. My parents paid the bill so it was okay and then she died and I stopped speaking to the woman from Seattle and I moved to Texas and still people were fitting old cars with new wheels. Somewhere without fences, a horse is still wild. Somewhere there is another universe in which the woman and I are married and my mom dances and holds with healthy arms our first-born child if certain theoretical physicists are to be believed. I wonder if it would make any difference to us if it were true. And how does one get paid to come up with such things? On his death bed Hardy cried out, “Eve, what is this?” though he had thought about it all his life. Are we to believe there is another Hardy—architect Hardy, Hardy-who-wrote-no-novels having the money to devote his life to poems? I picture horse jockey Hardy winning the race, and according to some, he exists. Well it all becomes quite meaningful and yet saying so doesn’t put a roof over one’s head, as they say, and still this woman is twisting lug-nuts into a doughnut to go somewhere presumably important. As he died, Socrates said, “So pay the debts and don’t be careless,” and there are many other stories like these. Where I falter is not “what will I say?” or “what did she last say?” but, “Here I am.” October almost over. Birds I don’t bother to name chirp pleasantly in cool sun. A fly beats at the glass. And, “here she is not.” No phone brightening with her name. No Texas sun through her window. No birds singing in the tightknit seams of her tree. No one running her miles every day at sunset into the Mountain Valley parks to pray. No teeth, no smile up into me. What horses carry her across to the heaven she knew? No wheels can take me to her home over the lowlands and the hills. No home, only horses. Like the Spanish invaders I can only see one thing as a vehicle for another. Like this woman, I take a long time trying to replace what is lost with something that looks the same.
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