RESTLESS HERD
I
She had horses who danced in their mothers’ arms.
She had horses who thought they were the sun and their bodies shone and burned like stars.
She had horses who waltzed nightly on the moon.
She had horses who were much too shy, and kept quiet in stalls of their own making.
—from “She Had Some Horses” by Joy Harjo
WHEN I think of order, I think of horse statues.
As a child in rural Michigan, I coveted them. They could sometimes be found at Goodwill, and a couple of times, on a birthday, I received a new one from a family friend. I housed my collection on a special wooden shelf my dad built before he died. It sat on the floor. Low. Kid-level. Boarded there, they were objets d’art. Taken out to play, they became real, but more-than-real, expressions of the Platonic form of “horse.” I brought them onto my bed and bent my right knee at an angle in which I could pretend they lived in a cave, and I their lone human connection. Each horse was its own being, of course, each with its particular musculature over which light played from my bedroom window. Together, the sum of the separate entities was more than its parts. On each was tied an invisible rope that tethered them to the word horse, the idea of horse, and to horse galloping through imagination’s realm. The Fighting Stallion, the Arabian Stallion, Man o’ War, the Mustang, the Bucking Bronco, the Running Foal. (Where were the mares? I had not yet approached that question.) The horses—the statues and the herds they represented—could be ordered in a number of ways depending on my need: by color, shade, size, attitude, breed, age. Some could be paired. Others repelled one another like magnets, or as I found myself repelled by the idea of mathematical sets I was learning in school, even though I was unknowingly enacting them at home, with horses. Later, as I moved into adolescence, I would do the same thing with troll dolls, who could be grouped by color of hair, length of hair, eye color, belly button, butt crack, and degree of evil, which my imagination supplied.
Maybe there is something to kid-level, to the way in which order and the imagination are not in binary opposition to each other but feed each other. Sugar cubes on an open hand.
II
A careless shoe-string, in whose tie
I see a wild civility:
Do more bewitch me than when art
Is too precise in every part.
—from “Delight in Disorder” by Robert Herrick
WHEN I think of order, I think of disorder.
I began writing poems before I knew what poems were. There was no internet, no social media with its surfeit of poems to model, mock, and learn from. There were books, some of which entered my house via my mother when she went to college as an English major at age thirty-four, after my father died. She built a bricks-and-boards bookcase in the living room, low to the ground, and there, sitting on the floor, I’d touch and read the books’ spines. Chaucer. Shakespeare. The Romantic period. (I imagined kissing.) Whitman. Emerson. Melville. Hawthorne. Conrad. Joyce. A book with a gray spine and red type: . I was old enough to know I was a girl and young enough to absorb, without resistance, the fact that all of these names belonged to men. (Where were the
