Listen to Dionisio Martínez reading this poem.
Every twelve years, give or take this moment, there are horses within
reach—wild, nameless horses like beasts before the flood, their hoof-
beats provoking the disheveled winds to mark an unremarkable spot
where the lesser roads became the plain; it’s not a stampede or the swish
of a drummer’s brushes or even imaginary breathing; it begins like
a story, which is to say: it begins by disappointing. Paper horses cut
out of comic books, their riders calling out their own names from what’s
left of them on what’s left of the pages. Each of the rooms in the house
is swept according to tradition, dust neatly piled in the center. It is some-
times possible from this vantage point to see the difference between
wholeness and a semblance of wholeness, to understand the duties of a
bystander when dark grass rises through sheets of ice. One horse carved
out of wood too green for burning—in a nod to innocence, when it was
possible not to pay attention to detail: Is a child drawn to the intricacies
of the saddle, or is there an innate compulsion to ride bareback? We carve
the past as we see it, and our vision is, at best, no more reliable than
TV reception avoiding sunspots. There’s always memory, of course—that
rented room paid in full before we move back in: if the horse were
hollow, we’d be thinking of places we know precious little about; we
would climb inside and wait for orders; we are willing to be that small.
