Michael Earl Craig

A kind of Danish cow long thought to be extinct lumbers slowly from a fog-soaked forest. Past the statue of two men shaking hands on horseback. Into the trainyard with its newly brunette-colored coal cars. It is late, lamps light the trainyard. One of the trainmen sees the cow and has a thought like a small grey infant sinking ever so slowly in the icy harbor. The cow continues out the other side of the trainyard. The trainman shudders at the thought. The trainman’s cat Stamina crunches walnuts in her cat dish. Now, nearly thirty years later, ladies and gentlemen it is my great pleasure to introduce to you that very same cow. (The cow is led out onto the stage by a young boy dressed as a farmer.)

This night nurse is different. She walks into my room and does not turn the light on. She thinks I am sleeping. I have just barely opened my left eye, am looking through the slightest slit, as moonlight exposes the room for what it really is — a collection of surfaces; lines and planes, mostly. The night nurse puts a foot up on the radiator and braces her clipboard on her knee as she appears to take down a few notes. I imagine she is working on a sonnet, and that her ankle looks like polished walnut. You imagine she is working on a crossword, and that her feet are killing her. The slightest slit is like an old gate at a Japanese tea garden at night, in the rain, that is supposed to be closed, that is supposed to be locked. “Someone has locked up poorly,” you’d say. “Incorrectly.” But no one has asked you.

Kurosawa was a moralist. It is said he took and gently bent Akutagawa’s grove. Akutagawa was trying to show us something. It is said he wore cold wet gloves when he wrote.

When trying to catch a horse it helps if you look away. Eye contact just pisses them off. But you can’t fake looking away, horses know when you are doing this. You have to really look away. Some horsemen never come out of  this.