Jaswinder Bolina

Sometimes the horse is simply a horse. Sometimes the horse is a stalwart bearer of bodies. Sometimes the horse is stubborn, refusing to ford the river, or the horse is a mistake in the vapor, what looks like a horse emerging out of a thrust of fog on Telegraph Avenue. There’s the perpetual feeling of being overdressed for summer and underdressed for spring. I’m variously sweat or shudder. I mistake the strange bodies for those I owe apologies to, oversleep and open my eyes on the clock radio, the time a typo, the apartment a disaster. Sometimes the horse is a disaster or the horse is time in a trot or a canter. Sometimes the horse is a boy growing in time into a man who often laments, A horse, a horse, my kingdom, etc. But there is no horse. There are two days good and one day bad without any hint of a horse. Sometimes speaking about the horse is a means of avoiding speaking about myself which is lousy. Late last night myself regarding another carelessly. Late last night my body with a temporary body. The horse is the taut metaphor for sex, but sometimes the horse is the taut silence after. Sometimes the horse is the silence after her body rises in the embarrassment of morning and leaves, and this silence is filled with less than remorse but with more than indifference. This is a feeling there is no word for. What I decided in place of what I needed. I should eat better. I should vacuum more often. I should settle down and raise a young horse. Sometimes the horse is unspoken, the horse is this feeling that will be forgotten, is the self unable to alter its ineffable horse. Late last night, a pervasive clopping of the horse on the hill. Late last night, the horse as a foghorn over the Bay. I should be rained on. I should not be forgiven.

pulse light starts there starts           getting smaller     All that you can’t remember, Claire says.  ,   With two glass eyes           I’m wobbling down a walkway          inflecting aloha                                        no thumbtacks, attached     no pins,           To feel.          Good by. among crimson and silver turnstiles,     all the folks          In orange, Silvery hats and thermal     The madmen mad getting madder     daisies all done          Again          me strolling, me fuming, slipping,   the stream frozen. the matter of face. the quasars huffing on.           In December   no summery mask,     No, just the shimmering scene, the firmament.     a blackbird indicating, nods Maybe a change    dust of a brick  maybe I remember,      I recall.      a cyclotron.          An ingenuous ramrod The flay of her hair               fall sinking          Rowboat turning to winter,     rowboat, rowboat      Chatter of the breakage iii.                              verb forms of a neutron bomb starts sloe gin     over time                    Fermenting in the firmament red shifting with Claire     waking with Claire, betweening and vaguing Claire          the embassies exchanging airs.          lily white, glittery photons          , spark                         at the bottom working iamb          iamb iamb                    iamb                                        iamb Claire    don’t care                    reminiscing          Tuscaloosa in.           A corner of the soiree.                              , standing so bluntly you resemble no one,          Precisely, as if receding          over a hill, you resembles everyone. corralling       , the bulky idea of the hill into. an encampment,                                                  a tiny cranium. And it’s                    as if,          Spying you                              through a whiskey on rocks.                    a mass hysteria I struttle along,      Making          commonplace.          Ubnutterances, and guts                                        your house is blue with two glass eyes iii.                              quantum entanglement starts with a single shot.          fired                not the year of my     fathers. slow, death starts.     year my mother goes     terminal, The vacuous scene          chattering,                         Like an elephant collapsing     the animals fuming,                              weird winged bugs The serious business of.    squishing them, they simply regroup. And reappear.    , Claire.          I’m stumbling down the thoroughfare. in a dark,  Pinching what few glittering photons,          I’m trolling. murky and building up.     start at the bottom,                    working a way Upwards     Evening,       like a tumbler.                    folding.  itself over Feeling contented all around.  squinting,          started clawing with two glass eyes          feeling for thumbtacks.                    Among the broad vagaries.                         among the wild visions,          Claire. . I say I know you better,                            , than.   You could imagine, or some other,          but you sock me.          Hard. In the gut instead. i.                              aimed by magnets starts redundant          Futile with a screwdriver, among the wrecks. ,  I am having a ball comma       Describe the house        comma paint the doorjamb end-stop               these months     spent   a-chatter. the sidewalk spinal column                              of a mule that carries me. Through the broad making-world.            one universe over, We are inseparable.      And own many cats     the city.                             Large. like  viewing an egg,                        From the egg’s interior. I go about the serious business   strolling,                                    The firmament Claire.   your pocket watch,          A frayed yellow.                                    T-shirt. on the narrative fringe.  of the narrative,                  the weightless photons say       Holding hands                              One universe over. You do not forgive me.            ,  all that I can’t                              but Maybe a small change maybe something less     than the sky, maybe something.                              More than the sky could conjure. ii.                                    if this were a sonnet, I start with all that you can’t remember.                  The gutters Overloaded.      the funky trinkets,           Weird winged bugs on the sill.                  In the air,      When I go about the     business , strolling home    Claire.                        riding the slipstream sloe gin.            All drink and whiskey.      the old ferry, a rowboat ,            in my gut.                        smooth as a mirror          Every mad Artifact     everyone I’ve ever met,                       resembling Claire dissembling          My wintered axe.            start at the bottom Work your way upwards.            like a signature saying I’ve been here, strolling past,            these fumes,                             on the air smell like a letter.            All thermal               , all water     Quasars bleating,      blackbird saying,      The search light pauses     Pluck The wings out one at a time.      Chicago and     blackbird, blackbird, I unaware.    of ours, the               recombinant bodies of the gods. i.                              focused by a lens starts with the scene     starts.               December,          Smooth as a mirror     Hard in the gut                         feels like a tumbler. Claire, inflecting               good, by.     walking. Claire.          the scene of sparks.     among the while, the fission The house is blue.     with two glass eyes     among the firmament no pins to pin you   No, thumbtacks to hold you          But photons and all the things that you can’t       .        Among the sloe gin, your frayed yellow T-shirt. I returned          to you, but you wanting In a corner of the soiree.  a corner of the prairie,     more than the sky This is where the elephant toppled.     when what you remember is Collided, with               Often     under the webbed foot Of my imagining, you     are the entire throng.          Wearing your face,     Dust of a brick,     what’s left is               What when the particle accelerator               paints its          disastered portrait iv.                        scatter many phrases starts with shatter.                                    , crossing the parking lot, my skin     pixilated in the sodium light, harsh corundum               skin a vapor trail                    edging the slipstream.            Tidy up the floorboards.            the wiggling infrastructure of a signature.                        says, I’ve been here before                    All airs as if a unified field.                  of night.      of     Claire.                  Collapse, arrangement of bones   where the elephant toppled.                  spells are cast, Luster in clusters,                        stone I toss          Chicago, the old ferry   through the house’s eye,  through the firmament     Light bulbs wilting,            carnations flickering,      Like a cyst the crick dribbles outward                         toward   a shore     my lady trickles, my lady pours          Give up give up,            my sweet canteen Been taken to the forest.      Honey.                  Among the wild fission.

Inside me lived a small donkey. I didn’t believe in magic, but the donkey was a sucker for the stuff. Psychics, illusionists, arthritics who’d predict the rainfall. That was the year I had trouble walking. I over-thought it and couldn’t get the rhythm right. The donkey re-taught me. “This foot. Yes, then that one. And swing your arms as if you’re going to trial to be exonerated of a crime you’ve most definitely committed.” Next, trouble sleeping because I’d need to crank the generator in my chest so frequently. Seeing I was overworked, the donkey finally hauled it out— it looked shiny and new, a silver dollar— and tossed it into a flock of birds who had to fly a long way to find safety. I knew then I was a large and dangerous man, what with this donkey living inside me, but felt futile. One day, during a final lesson on breathing, the donkey asked what kind of jeans I was wearing. I said, “The somber ones.” “Poor kid.” “So will you be staying on for a third year, donkey?” “No. I think I should be leaving soon. I think I should go and await your arrival beside the crumpled river.” “Yes, I suppose you have many important matters to attend to, but maybe one day I will come and join you for a drink or, perhaps, for a brief nap.”

I’m grateful to the man now sleeping with my ex-lover. It’s true I loved her, but it’s right that someone be with her now in the dark hour of our republic. Life is no good anymore. There are no jobs and no money, so it’s good that someone be with her now under street lamps filtered through sheer curtains at night, the pale approximation of daylight illuminating the outer slope of my ex-lover’s left thigh and the asymmetric birthmark located there I thought resembled the bust of Martin Van Buren, which that man should smooch now and cherish as I did those tender hours on the other side of time and the republic when in the opulence of waking I’d move to the window to squint at the dapper bodies passing which seemed then to know where they were going. What awaited when they arrived there. No job, no money, I’m grateful for the man now nuzzling and elating with my ex-lover, how she survives with him this dark hour, its sad redundancies, the human condition like a phonograph skipping, which is the condition of urging the same thing over and anticipating a different result. How dull it is, its mimeographed disasters, dull how the bankers are offing themselves now in morning again, leaping from windows again, the republic fretting as if it’s the first republic, the first dark hour, and dull the way the man drives daily at daybreak away from my ex-lover in an extravagant light believing that if he does, that when he does, he’ll be the first to hurt her. O enduring sun.

We will eventually be archaeology, but now in America I tell my young daughter the new headlights are a bluish-white instead of the murky yellow of my upbringing. She’s busy with her bubble-making, her dig in the flower bed, her pantomimed banquet, phantom guests dining on her small handfuls of weeds and grasses. Precisely, the lit up jackrabbits appear in peculiar blue candor under the stoplight dusk, pigeons hued reddish are garrulous and incomprehensible as drunks at the end of the cocktail hour. It’s that time in America when the air is overgrowth. The piquancy of coriander neighbors allowed to flower mingles with fragrances we douse our clothes-lined laundry in each week to cloister the body’s reeking. Truck smoke from the interstate. I’m out-of-doors, which is to say nature is hemmed in by doors, which is to say nature is a category of my making, and I can’t say why the skittish, black bugs flit into the house when there’s so much turf afforded them already, but tonight I’ll crush a few with a Newsweek before sleeping. Now, it’s that time in America in the out-of-doors beneath tree and trellis and vapor trails of overnight flights fare-thee-welling to London and Morocco. Brandy in soda water, a xylophone jingle of the ice, I sit in my Adirondack without my minute, Midwestern wife who Tuesday returns from her summit in Cleveland. It’s that time when I’m alone in America with my young daughter who startles herself realizing the woodpile beneath that black oak is itself formerly a tree, and she wants to know whether these trees have feelings. It’s this acquaintance with death she so improves upon annually. It’s in this precise moment in America that I realize this acquainting, this becoming familiar, this cordiality with death is the entire task of her growing older. Next year her ficus will die and the next year her minnow will die, and it’s in these moments in America when my daughter’s plump lip quivers in a preface to bawling, when I’m alone and can do too little, I say, I’m sorry life is too much, my love, I’m sorry my love, it isn’t enough.

I’m standing in field 17 of the long series, employing my scythe. Sometimes a conceptual dog bounds past me, though it’s never my conceptual dog. Occasionally future laureates gather for colloquium, though they’re rarely my future laureates. Thus, evening proceeds precisely the way the handbook describes it: as a proceeding: a runnel: shallow and babbling. Into it a stranger appears. He looks like my friend. I ask him, Are you my friend? Gravity telegraphs its heavy message through the lolling vines. The strangers says, I’ve sold all my clothes and am considering, for a career, perpetual suffering. The sun slides a tongue down the nape of the grain elevator. Lowing cattle. It’s the fourth of July. In Spain. I say, You are most vague and mysterious, friend. The dog paces. I set my scythe aside and tell him, I have employed this scythe mercilessly all my life and still everywhere these stalks extend. He says, Someone is always worse off than us even at our most pitiable. Yes, I say. I read it once in a magazine. And we laugh, let our enormous bellies jangle. It is good to laugh with my friend and let the scythe cool, I say. Yes, he says. Good.

In sun the sunburned skin sloughs off the sunburned shoulder. Most folks believe this is the body’s slow mend. Most folks believe in the good yolk of the soul. I believe in autopsy lingo of natural causes should be replaced with of long-term exposure to the dim, unwavering radiation of the morning star. The evening they burn your body, I step into the garden and arrange a crooked line of birdbaths to skip stones across until a bell tower tolls its eight arguments against daylight and the skyline illuminates, ragged and unmended like a poem turned on its side. The evening they burn your body, I believe I’ll step into the living room and be greeted by you or by someone who could play you in a movie. The curtains are an aurora of earthly proportion. You don’t exist. A flash igniting the paned glass is the silent lightning outrunning its noise. You’re on fire.