ABOUT THE ARTIST
Susannah Stubbs is a graduate of Hendrix College, where she majored in English/Creative-Writing. Susannah is an artist-in-residence for OpenHorizons.org, and is currently participating in a Year of Service in South Korea through the Presbyterian Young Adult Volunteers program.
Susannah Stubbs is a graduate of Hendrix College, where she majored in English/Creative-Writing. Susannah is an artist-in-residence for OpenHorizons.org, and is currently participating in a Year of Service in South Korea through the Presbyterian Young Adult Volunteers program.
Beasts of Burden
When I was a third grader, I would race other children around the wood-beamed borders of our school’s gravel playground. I ran fast. So fast that I was dubbed (or perhaps dubbed myself; I was a little prideful) “The Mustang.” During one of these races, I tripped and fell, my right knee crashing into the head of a large nail embedded in one of the wooden beams. The knee bled and bled, and I limped to the nurse feeling at once afraid and proud. A good horse is covered in scars because a good horse runs and fights for what she believes. I still have a patch of extra-smooth pink skin just below my right kneecap, and I find myself rubbing it absentmindedly when I wear shorts and dresses.
Years later, I would look back and laugh at my nickname, thinking that “mustang” was a word that never could be used for me, a masculine term in the same vein as “stallion.” Just lately I have found that the word “mustang” can refer to any sex or age of horse. The only qualifier is that the horse must be feral—descended, perhaps, from domesticated horses, but now running free.
--
When I was telling a classmate about the premise of this essay, she turned to me with a knowing look and said, “Ohh, were you a horse girl?”
I didn’t know how to answer that question, but I do know that horses filled my younger years. I read, watched, and imagined horses. I rode real horses when I had the rare opportunity.
“Horse girl.” Why are there so many of us, so many that we are a cultural trope, something so repeated that it has a name? Freud (a man) would have argued that young girls are fascinated with horses because they represent the male sexuality that they will never have. This theory came at a time in which society was growing more and more afraid of the things that women were starting to put between their legs—bicycles and horses, that is. We know now that this is a lie. Girls do not love horses for envy of men. Our love goes so much deeper than that.
--
“But it was putting my heart to the horse’s that made me know
the sorrow of horses. The sorrow
of a brook creasing a field. The maggot
turning in its corpse. Made me
forsake my thumbs for the sheen of unshod hooves.”
I remember, when I was seven or eight years old, watching the film Spirit over and over and over again, with Bryan Adams’ soundtrack lending synthesizers, guitar, and a gravelly voice to the title horse’s animated odyssey to freedom. It was one of the first films that helped me to understand that the strong, sad, and beautiful can be one. Ross Gay voices the horse much more quietly, but with the same sense of respect. He trades the epic and galloping for a “slow honest tongue”. His poem “Becoming a Horse” sidles us up close enough to the creature to feel its breath. It brings us as close to tactile sensation as poetically possible. Gay strokes his words over the belly and mouth and nose and heart and hooves of the horse, and he narrates the way in which doing this “made [him] know” what it is to be a horse: peaceful, sorrowful, natural, deep.
The use of the phrase “made me” or “made me know” brings to mind ideas not of force or communication but of metamorphosis. The horse does nothing to try and tell Gay of the “sorrow / of a brook creasing a field”. The horse displays little tangible agency in the poem, but its real agency lies in the impact that his body and heart have on Gay. The horse disarms the poet, in the end compelling him to lay down his weapons and even his words.
Gay writes of a “small song” in the chest of the horse, and this song is found in small snatches of music throughout the poem. Just the second line of the poem, “loosing the bit and wiping the spit” canters with precise rhyme and meter. The movement then slows and Gay goes from physical observation to emotional understanding, with less musical but equally graceful lines that sway in place on four long legs. Repeated sounds still abound. The r’s of “The maggot / turning in its corpse” squirm morbidly, and the sh’s in “the sheen of unshod hooves” bring light, though tinted with melancholy, back into the poem.
--
A summer or so ago, in Guatemala, I rode a horse up a volcano because I couldn’t breathe well enough to walk up by myself. It was raining, and it was almost more frightening skittering up the wet rocks on horseback. I wasn’t helping anything, just transferring my weight and the weight of the anxiety of weeks to this knobby, tan creature. I felt guilty. I kept on asking the horse’s guide his name, but it was something so unfamiliar that I kept forgetting it—it had two syllables and a “ch” in it somewhere, maybe. We had stopped to wait on the other horses carrying the rest of us who had given up the climb when something startled my horse and he jerked his head back, crashing, hard, into my own turned head. I have pictures on my phone from that day of me and the team I was working with, and most of them are okay, but there’s one that captured me making the most pathetic face I’ve ever seen. I’ve got stringy wet hair, eyes squinty and red, my face looking defeated. I think I deleted it and just kept the smiling ones because it made me too sad to look at it.
Thankfully, my head was sore for less than a week, but for a long time after that day, I could not stop writing and thinking about it (I still cannot, obviously). It is so haunting but so common, the harm that living things do to one another simply out of fear or need or instinct or unknowing.
--
Horses have long captured the imaginations of every culture in which they are present. They are symbols of freedom and nobility, created by gods and ridden by the powerful. For the Norse and Central Asian peoples, and I am sure many others, they were the way between life and death, between the waking world and unseen worlds of dreams and the dead. In my Christian faith, we have the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, but I doubt that the horses themselves bring any of the destruction to Judgment Day. The focus, of course (because Christianity is markedly anthropocentric) is on the men and not the horses. The most enthralling horse myth I’ve ever encountered, though, is the Celtic capall uisce (say: “copple ooshka”) or water horse. I once read a book by Maggie Stiefvater, The Scorpio Races, that told the story of a girl named Puck who rode one of these horses in an annual race on her island. These creatures come from the sea and drown or devour people, and dozens of riders lose their lives to their horses every year. I remember being completely engrossed in this book and mystified by Stiefvater’s descriptions of the horses. There was something inside of me, maybe my inner horse girl, that was convinced that like Puck I could gain the trust of a killer horse. I don’t know how true that is and I will likely never find out, but even if I couldn’t tame one, I don’t think I could fear a water horse enough to stop loving and wanting to be loved by one. I could lose an arm to a horse and still adore her.
--
I’ve been to Guatemala three times. The first time I came back home I found myself sitting in an airport in Texas, staring up at the television enraged at a commercial for weight loss supplements. I found myself taking hot showers in a shiny, bright bathroom that I realized was my own, and wearing beautiful, clean clothes that were also mine. I had been to another world—a less comfortable world, with beautifully different ways of speaking and showing love, but also with devastating disparities in living conditions. After visiting two more times, the last time for three months, things still don’t quite make sense. It could not have been in this life that I rode through the mountains and realized that I was in love for the first time. It could not have been in this life that three years later I would get to spend nearly every day with dozens of doe-eyed children who would huddle around my guitar and strum it as if it might somehow yield candy or magic spells. It could not have been in this life that I stood in my backyard and watched a volcano erupt from a hundred miles away, glimmering orange like a melting star. It could not have been in this life that our neighborhood lost a young girl because her father kicked her out of the house and she was left alone to be shot on the streets of the city.
After that summer, I stayed in Scotland to study for a while, yet another world. I took buses to the ocean and planes to Spain and Switzerland and France. I sat on the grass under a glittering Eiffel Tower and wrote poetry on top of boulders and stood in the quiet white walls of a monastery backed by silvery Alps. It could not have been in this life.
--
“Some men say an army of horse and some men say an army on foot
and some men say an army of ships is the most beautiful thing
on the black earth. But I say it is
what you love.”
The Greek poet Sappho’s work is scattered in sometimes unrecognizable (but always beautiful) constellations across literature, making it even more dazzling when a line or two of hers is found in fullness. Her repetition is powerful without forcefulness, linguistically rejecting the same show of strength that her words reject ideologically. Choose love over power. Choose mercy over brutality. But still, humanity wages war on itself: by horse, by foot, by boat… It is strange, though, that Sappho imagines an “army of horse” and not an “army on horses”. What would an army of horses be like, without humans to supply the killing and the casualties? I can only see beauty in that. I don’t believe that an army of horses alone would ever go to battle.
--
The average thoroughbred foal weighs around 100 pounds at birth, a tenth of the weight of its 1,000-pound mother. My younger brother weighed 1 pound and 10 ounces when he was born. He was meant to be born in August, but in May my mother was rushed to the hospital with pre-eclampsia. Not thinking about how this baby could have meant the end of my mother, or the end for them both, I marveled at his fingers, as thin as matchsticks, and his feet, the size of strawberries. He survived two months of living in a hospital incubator instead of a womb, and though he still doesn’t weigh as much as a newborn foal, he has the long, knobby legs of one. It is still difficult for me sometimes to connect those two creatures, one so dangerously small and the other so bright and thriving.
--
“but I am not someone who likes to wound
rather I have a quiet mind”
For Sappho, smallness is in no way connected to weakness. Smallness for her is power. They may be the scraps of what happened to survive of her poetry, or they may be tactful uses of absence, but her shortest fragments sit on the page in the posture of a woman sitting on a horse. You may be focused on the person in the saddle, but the real power is underneath, in the whitespace around the words, in the emotions that come from some hidden place that the silence reaches. Though it is a translation, I imagine the rhythm would remain much the same—the first line in its English form is in perfect iambic pentameter, and the second with its lack of four ending syllables leaves the reader prematurely to dwell with their own mind. The “rather” is what puzzles me most about this fragment. I don’t quite know its purpose–disturbing the poem visually and rhythmically? I do know that without it something deep would change. The poem would become more declarative than meditative, more prideful than meek.
I read once that the Greek word for meek, πράος or práos, really means “power under control.” For a writer, perhaps the ultimate meekness is to write fewer words despite the urge to see every new line as an opportunity for more power. Sappho, by choice or by cosmic accident, is a queen of meekness. Her words are strong, sad, and beautiful. They feel like they will never belong in whatever time or place they are being read in. They are from somewhere else that most people won’t get to see. I think that if resurrection were possible and someone could be elected equine poet laureate, a voice for the horses, I would vote for Sappho.
--
When I got home from Guatemala and then from Scotland, I started losing things—the names of children at the orphanage, the Spanish slang that our Guatemalan leaders taught us (though I will never forget--patojo means “little punk”), the singing voices of my Scottish friends, the different smell of the rain in each place. It made me feel like something was wrong with me, like if I was a better human being I wouldn’t forget. It’s like that after losing a person, too. My grandmother died when I was in high school and I worry about what I may have forgotten about her. I find myself thinking about this all the time, trying to gather up and hold memories of the people I still have for fear of forgetting them if they leave. Even if there are others who share your memories, it is terrifying to feel that you may be failing as a protector of someone’s footprints on the earth and in your mind.
--
“Everything that falls upon the eye is apparition, a sheet dropped over the world’s true workings. The nerves and the brain are tricked, and one is left with dreams that these specters loose their hands from ours and walk away, the curve of the back and the swing of the coat so familiar as to imply that they should be permanent fixtures of the world, when in fact nothing is more perishable.”
Marilynne Robinson writes this haunting passage in her novel Housekeeping, a book that I could read a hundred times and still find another immaculately strange sentence that makes me wonder how could I have missed this? The novel’s reality itself is questionable in a way that feels at once magical and hyper-realistic, as if the setting, the town of Fingerbone, is a place where the sheet has indeed been lifted. It is a world full of deaths and spiritual encounters and blurred memories.
Familiarity never guarantees permanence and so many things that feel like they should last forever, like “the curve of the back and the swing of the coat”, go away. One of the most startling things about moments such as this in Robinson’s writing is that these passages come from the first-person narration of Ruth, a young girl at the time of the story. She has lost family members and caretakers and is in the end left with only her aunt. She may narrate her story from years after its events, but as a girl, Ruth already feels the great weight of the transience of life. She feels out of place in the world because the world as she knows it has changed so much that it is unrecognizable.
--
Horses and many of their hooved cousins are often referred to as “beasts of burden.” I’ve never really felt good about this name. Mostly, it gives me feelings of guilt knowing that it is my kind that bestows the burdens. I’m starting to think, though I still hate the idea of a creature forced into this carrying, that it’s not always such a terrible phrase. It might not be so bad to be a beast of burden if it means being able to carry around wonderful things before they are gone.
I live in Arkansas and will for as long as I can see right now, but often I feel like I am living inside of my mind. Sometimes it is claustrophobic. It’s painful. At other times it is expansive and beautiful. I don’t claim to be wise or strong or experienced, and I am in awe of those who I know have felt so much more pain or seen so much more beauty than I have (I hope I don’t sound like a drama queen to you—this is all for you). I do know, though, that I have been to a few places in my life and felt like I belonged in nearly every single one of them, and that I have lost things. They are all a part of me now, and many nights I still close my eyes and can see the skylines and faces and stars that I love so much and may never see again. It is one of the saddest and most joyful feelings that I know, to be transported for a moment by an image or a smell or a thought back to somewhere you may never really see again.
Maybe I’m more of a horse than I think I am.
--
“And in this way drop my torches.
And in this way drop my knives.
Feel the small song in my chest
swell and my coat glisten and twitch.
And my face grow long.
And these words cast off, at last,
for the slow honest tongue of horses.”
This is how “Becoming a Horse” ends. Ross Gay’s surrender begins with a slow description of the horse and then quickens in its conviction with the earnestly repeating lines “And in this way drop my torches. / And in this way drop my knives.” His hands turn to hooves and he gives up his capacity for violence. The phrase “cast off, at last”, resonates with the energy and freedom that Gay finds in this transformation before the last line ends the poem gently. Saying “slow honest tongue” takes care and patience—only the patient would make the pause between the t ending “honest” and the t beginning “tongue.” This line brings the poem to a deeply content ending and demands nothing from the reader but to witness.
To live at peace with the fact that worlds change and people leave and memories fade, to stop fighting against this and to simply carry the lovely fragments of what is left, this is to become a horse. With his words, Ross Gay has morphed into a horse before our very eyes, standing before us on four legs with a nodding, knowing face. Next to him, scribbled in gradually messier handwriting, lies the poem on a scrap of paper, a sort of last testament.
When I was a third grader, I would race other children around the wood-beamed borders of our school’s gravel playground. I ran fast. So fast that I was dubbed (or perhaps dubbed myself; I was a little prideful) “The Mustang.” During one of these races, I tripped and fell, my right knee crashing into the head of a large nail embedded in one of the wooden beams. The knee bled and bled, and I limped to the nurse feeling at once afraid and proud. A good horse is covered in scars because a good horse runs and fights for what she believes. I still have a patch of extra-smooth pink skin just below my right kneecap, and I find myself rubbing it absentmindedly when I wear shorts and dresses.
Years later, I would look back and laugh at my nickname, thinking that “mustang” was a word that never could be used for me, a masculine term in the same vein as “stallion.” Just lately I have found that the word “mustang” can refer to any sex or age of horse. The only qualifier is that the horse must be feral—descended, perhaps, from domesticated horses, but now running free.
--
When I was telling a classmate about the premise of this essay, she turned to me with a knowing look and said, “Ohh, were you a horse girl?”
I didn’t know how to answer that question, but I do know that horses filled my younger years. I read, watched, and imagined horses. I rode real horses when I had the rare opportunity.
“Horse girl.” Why are there so many of us, so many that we are a cultural trope, something so repeated that it has a name? Freud (a man) would have argued that young girls are fascinated with horses because they represent the male sexuality that they will never have. This theory came at a time in which society was growing more and more afraid of the things that women were starting to put between their legs—bicycles and horses, that is. We know now that this is a lie. Girls do not love horses for envy of men. Our love goes so much deeper than that.
--
“But it was putting my heart to the horse’s that made me know
the sorrow of horses. The sorrow
of a brook creasing a field. The maggot
turning in its corpse. Made me
forsake my thumbs for the sheen of unshod hooves.”
I remember, when I was seven or eight years old, watching the film Spirit over and over and over again, with Bryan Adams’ soundtrack lending synthesizers, guitar, and a gravelly voice to the title horse’s animated odyssey to freedom. It was one of the first films that helped me to understand that the strong, sad, and beautiful can be one. Ross Gay voices the horse much more quietly, but with the same sense of respect. He trades the epic and galloping for a “slow honest tongue”. His poem “Becoming a Horse” sidles us up close enough to the creature to feel its breath. It brings us as close to tactile sensation as poetically possible. Gay strokes his words over the belly and mouth and nose and heart and hooves of the horse, and he narrates the way in which doing this “made [him] know” what it is to be a horse: peaceful, sorrowful, natural, deep.
The use of the phrase “made me” or “made me know” brings to mind ideas not of force or communication but of metamorphosis. The horse does nothing to try and tell Gay of the “sorrow / of a brook creasing a field”. The horse displays little tangible agency in the poem, but its real agency lies in the impact that his body and heart have on Gay. The horse disarms the poet, in the end compelling him to lay down his weapons and even his words.
Gay writes of a “small song” in the chest of the horse, and this song is found in small snatches of music throughout the poem. Just the second line of the poem, “loosing the bit and wiping the spit” canters with precise rhyme and meter. The movement then slows and Gay goes from physical observation to emotional understanding, with less musical but equally graceful lines that sway in place on four long legs. Repeated sounds still abound. The r’s of “The maggot / turning in its corpse” squirm morbidly, and the sh’s in “the sheen of unshod hooves” bring light, though tinted with melancholy, back into the poem.
--
A summer or so ago, in Guatemala, I rode a horse up a volcano because I couldn’t breathe well enough to walk up by myself. It was raining, and it was almost more frightening skittering up the wet rocks on horseback. I wasn’t helping anything, just transferring my weight and the weight of the anxiety of weeks to this knobby, tan creature. I felt guilty. I kept on asking the horse’s guide his name, but it was something so unfamiliar that I kept forgetting it—it had two syllables and a “ch” in it somewhere, maybe. We had stopped to wait on the other horses carrying the rest of us who had given up the climb when something startled my horse and he jerked his head back, crashing, hard, into my own turned head. I have pictures on my phone from that day of me and the team I was working with, and most of them are okay, but there’s one that captured me making the most pathetic face I’ve ever seen. I’ve got stringy wet hair, eyes squinty and red, my face looking defeated. I think I deleted it and just kept the smiling ones because it made me too sad to look at it.
Thankfully, my head was sore for less than a week, but for a long time after that day, I could not stop writing and thinking about it (I still cannot, obviously). It is so haunting but so common, the harm that living things do to one another simply out of fear or need or instinct or unknowing.
--
Horses have long captured the imaginations of every culture in which they are present. They are symbols of freedom and nobility, created by gods and ridden by the powerful. For the Norse and Central Asian peoples, and I am sure many others, they were the way between life and death, between the waking world and unseen worlds of dreams and the dead. In my Christian faith, we have the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, but I doubt that the horses themselves bring any of the destruction to Judgment Day. The focus, of course (because Christianity is markedly anthropocentric) is on the men and not the horses. The most enthralling horse myth I’ve ever encountered, though, is the Celtic capall uisce (say: “copple ooshka”) or water horse. I once read a book by Maggie Stiefvater, The Scorpio Races, that told the story of a girl named Puck who rode one of these horses in an annual race on her island. These creatures come from the sea and drown or devour people, and dozens of riders lose their lives to their horses every year. I remember being completely engrossed in this book and mystified by Stiefvater’s descriptions of the horses. There was something inside of me, maybe my inner horse girl, that was convinced that like Puck I could gain the trust of a killer horse. I don’t know how true that is and I will likely never find out, but even if I couldn’t tame one, I don’t think I could fear a water horse enough to stop loving and wanting to be loved by one. I could lose an arm to a horse and still adore her.
--
I’ve been to Guatemala three times. The first time I came back home I found myself sitting in an airport in Texas, staring up at the television enraged at a commercial for weight loss supplements. I found myself taking hot showers in a shiny, bright bathroom that I realized was my own, and wearing beautiful, clean clothes that were also mine. I had been to another world—a less comfortable world, with beautifully different ways of speaking and showing love, but also with devastating disparities in living conditions. After visiting two more times, the last time for three months, things still don’t quite make sense. It could not have been in this life that I rode through the mountains and realized that I was in love for the first time. It could not have been in this life that three years later I would get to spend nearly every day with dozens of doe-eyed children who would huddle around my guitar and strum it as if it might somehow yield candy or magic spells. It could not have been in this life that I stood in my backyard and watched a volcano erupt from a hundred miles away, glimmering orange like a melting star. It could not have been in this life that our neighborhood lost a young girl because her father kicked her out of the house and she was left alone to be shot on the streets of the city.
After that summer, I stayed in Scotland to study for a while, yet another world. I took buses to the ocean and planes to Spain and Switzerland and France. I sat on the grass under a glittering Eiffel Tower and wrote poetry on top of boulders and stood in the quiet white walls of a monastery backed by silvery Alps. It could not have been in this life.
--
“Some men say an army of horse and some men say an army on foot
and some men say an army of ships is the most beautiful thing
on the black earth. But I say it is
what you love.”
The Greek poet Sappho’s work is scattered in sometimes unrecognizable (but always beautiful) constellations across literature, making it even more dazzling when a line or two of hers is found in fullness. Her repetition is powerful without forcefulness, linguistically rejecting the same show of strength that her words reject ideologically. Choose love over power. Choose mercy over brutality. But still, humanity wages war on itself: by horse, by foot, by boat… It is strange, though, that Sappho imagines an “army of horse” and not an “army on horses”. What would an army of horses be like, without humans to supply the killing and the casualties? I can only see beauty in that. I don’t believe that an army of horses alone would ever go to battle.
--
The average thoroughbred foal weighs around 100 pounds at birth, a tenth of the weight of its 1,000-pound mother. My younger brother weighed 1 pound and 10 ounces when he was born. He was meant to be born in August, but in May my mother was rushed to the hospital with pre-eclampsia. Not thinking about how this baby could have meant the end of my mother, or the end for them both, I marveled at his fingers, as thin as matchsticks, and his feet, the size of strawberries. He survived two months of living in a hospital incubator instead of a womb, and though he still doesn’t weigh as much as a newborn foal, he has the long, knobby legs of one. It is still difficult for me sometimes to connect those two creatures, one so dangerously small and the other so bright and thriving.
--
“but I am not someone who likes to wound
rather I have a quiet mind”
For Sappho, smallness is in no way connected to weakness. Smallness for her is power. They may be the scraps of what happened to survive of her poetry, or they may be tactful uses of absence, but her shortest fragments sit on the page in the posture of a woman sitting on a horse. You may be focused on the person in the saddle, but the real power is underneath, in the whitespace around the words, in the emotions that come from some hidden place that the silence reaches. Though it is a translation, I imagine the rhythm would remain much the same—the first line in its English form is in perfect iambic pentameter, and the second with its lack of four ending syllables leaves the reader prematurely to dwell with their own mind. The “rather” is what puzzles me most about this fragment. I don’t quite know its purpose–disturbing the poem visually and rhythmically? I do know that without it something deep would change. The poem would become more declarative than meditative, more prideful than meek.
I read once that the Greek word for meek, πράος or práos, really means “power under control.” For a writer, perhaps the ultimate meekness is to write fewer words despite the urge to see every new line as an opportunity for more power. Sappho, by choice or by cosmic accident, is a queen of meekness. Her words are strong, sad, and beautiful. They feel like they will never belong in whatever time or place they are being read in. They are from somewhere else that most people won’t get to see. I think that if resurrection were possible and someone could be elected equine poet laureate, a voice for the horses, I would vote for Sappho.
--
When I got home from Guatemala and then from Scotland, I started losing things—the names of children at the orphanage, the Spanish slang that our Guatemalan leaders taught us (though I will never forget--patojo means “little punk”), the singing voices of my Scottish friends, the different smell of the rain in each place. It made me feel like something was wrong with me, like if I was a better human being I wouldn’t forget. It’s like that after losing a person, too. My grandmother died when I was in high school and I worry about what I may have forgotten about her. I find myself thinking about this all the time, trying to gather up and hold memories of the people I still have for fear of forgetting them if they leave. Even if there are others who share your memories, it is terrifying to feel that you may be failing as a protector of someone’s footprints on the earth and in your mind.
--
“Everything that falls upon the eye is apparition, a sheet dropped over the world’s true workings. The nerves and the brain are tricked, and one is left with dreams that these specters loose their hands from ours and walk away, the curve of the back and the swing of the coat so familiar as to imply that they should be permanent fixtures of the world, when in fact nothing is more perishable.”
Marilynne Robinson writes this haunting passage in her novel Housekeeping, a book that I could read a hundred times and still find another immaculately strange sentence that makes me wonder how could I have missed this? The novel’s reality itself is questionable in a way that feels at once magical and hyper-realistic, as if the setting, the town of Fingerbone, is a place where the sheet has indeed been lifted. It is a world full of deaths and spiritual encounters and blurred memories.
Familiarity never guarantees permanence and so many things that feel like they should last forever, like “the curve of the back and the swing of the coat”, go away. One of the most startling things about moments such as this in Robinson’s writing is that these passages come from the first-person narration of Ruth, a young girl at the time of the story. She has lost family members and caretakers and is in the end left with only her aunt. She may narrate her story from years after its events, but as a girl, Ruth already feels the great weight of the transience of life. She feels out of place in the world because the world as she knows it has changed so much that it is unrecognizable.
--
Horses and many of their hooved cousins are often referred to as “beasts of burden.” I’ve never really felt good about this name. Mostly, it gives me feelings of guilt knowing that it is my kind that bestows the burdens. I’m starting to think, though I still hate the idea of a creature forced into this carrying, that it’s not always such a terrible phrase. It might not be so bad to be a beast of burden if it means being able to carry around wonderful things before they are gone.
I live in Arkansas and will for as long as I can see right now, but often I feel like I am living inside of my mind. Sometimes it is claustrophobic. It’s painful. At other times it is expansive and beautiful. I don’t claim to be wise or strong or experienced, and I am in awe of those who I know have felt so much more pain or seen so much more beauty than I have (I hope I don’t sound like a drama queen to you—this is all for you). I do know, though, that I have been to a few places in my life and felt like I belonged in nearly every single one of them, and that I have lost things. They are all a part of me now, and many nights I still close my eyes and can see the skylines and faces and stars that I love so much and may never see again. It is one of the saddest and most joyful feelings that I know, to be transported for a moment by an image or a smell or a thought back to somewhere you may never really see again.
Maybe I’m more of a horse than I think I am.
--
“And in this way drop my torches.
And in this way drop my knives.
Feel the small song in my chest
swell and my coat glisten and twitch.
And my face grow long.
And these words cast off, at last,
for the slow honest tongue of horses.”
This is how “Becoming a Horse” ends. Ross Gay’s surrender begins with a slow description of the horse and then quickens in its conviction with the earnestly repeating lines “And in this way drop my torches. / And in this way drop my knives.” His hands turn to hooves and he gives up his capacity for violence. The phrase “cast off, at last”, resonates with the energy and freedom that Gay finds in this transformation before the last line ends the poem gently. Saying “slow honest tongue” takes care and patience—only the patient would make the pause between the t ending “honest” and the t beginning “tongue.” This line brings the poem to a deeply content ending and demands nothing from the reader but to witness.
To live at peace with the fact that worlds change and people leave and memories fade, to stop fighting against this and to simply carry the lovely fragments of what is left, this is to become a horse. With his words, Ross Gay has morphed into a horse before our very eyes, standing before us on four legs with a nodding, knowing face. Next to him, scribbled in gradually messier handwriting, lies the poem on a scrap of paper, a sort of last testament.
