OVERNIGHT A HORSE APPEARED
I crawled out of a war machine.
You didn’t recognize it as such, but
I did. I held it and nurtured it
and fed it strange wooden apples from my purse.
To spend a lifetime waiting inside
a stick horse is to live with the confusion
between hollow and hallow. I’ve lived
in this one room my whole life.
It looks a lot like outside. A tiny farrier
by the red barn in the distance. Four horses waiting
to gather us up. We cannot see beyond them.
We coloured their coats
to explain the end to ourselves.
The red horse and the pale horse
and the other and there is hunger. A tiny farrier
on the horizon line. Meaning, it’s time
to crawl back inside myself. As the wind,
I’m drawing these patterns in the sand.
Accept the horse as a dangerous gift
you find meaningful, the offering
before the first burning arrow is fired
into the city. It could have been
fireworks or lightning. For my horse and me,
it hardly matters. Though it will matter for you:
how you decide to read me or
whether you do. Overnight, one horse
will gather us. The equine sternum
a drawbridge to a corporeal castle
we are plotting inside. Four horses
released on the unsuspecting city. I am the only one left
inside the warhorse I am holding in my hands.
I will have to live with him, maybe
for him. I am ready
to practice non-participation.
I want this to be the last thing I’ll ever do,
to stop here and say I’ll go no further.
MYNAH – LAST TIME
Mynah, if I knew how to play bridge would you love me better?
, I attached your leg to my key chain.
, I’m a bad loser. I didn’t win the award for sportsmanship.
Mynah, I crawled around in the pigsty and now I don’t know what I am.
, the distance between your house and mine is expanding.
, I can’t cross over the field.
Mynah, I loved it when you shot me. I deserved it so much.
Mynah, I don’t think I want to eat berries and insects anymore.
, my entire flock is of mediocre quality. The craftsmanship is
shoddy.
, you are just a shapely hole I sometimes fill in with words.
, if I stop, we’ll have to sit in silence.
Mynah, if you left me a feather or a beak I could build you again.
, give me something to work with.
Mynah, I took a fish-gutting knife and cut off my toe.
Mynah, it’s possible to survive without a toe.
Mynah, I let the dog loose in the field and she swallowed you.
, the grass swallowed her. I swallowed myself.
Mynah, we can’t have this conversation another time.
Mynah, the wind doesn’t scare me.
Mynah, I didn’t think the wind would scare me.
DREAM IN WHICH I AM SEPARATED FROM MYSELF
I don’t want to see the city through
myself anymore. I imagine an open body
stuck with pins and flags ready
for labelling. The city is a city of constant
sidewalk repairs and household renovations.
I would know enough to miss myself.
The city is a city of streets named
after saints and explorers. On the dock
I am cold. I imagine myself
at an art gallery looking at installations
and not pretending there can be
any sort of understanding.
But somewhere the water
may meet the unseen shore
and someone like you believes
it happens. There
is a line where they touch.
I would like to speak
to that line and have it speak
to me in return.
MYNAH DREAMS HIMSELF INTO A STATUE
and when he came he lopped off the beginning
along with the feet in favour of the here and now
and when he came he repeated something quietly
in the empty room I built a skeleton
and he dreamt a piece of fabric to attach his broken wing
and when he understood he was a statue the sea was a bathtub
he couldn’t enter and the rest was draped with sheets
he laid his shadow on them
and under pressure he was stripped and stripped again not knowing
how to lift the sheets to ruin the imminent surprise and he repeated
hollow
and this became the dream his dream in which I did not allow him
to speak
and the dream in which I imagined him speechless before me
and he repeated I am something
awaking on a back seat and who will swear the statue not accountable
the dream not accountable my tongue his
tongue an antenna and then
who will call out
and calling out who will answer
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
To my family and friends, many thanks. A huge thank you to my editor, Kevin Connolly, who helped shape and tweak this book into its present form. To Alana Wilcox, Christina Palassio, Evan Munday and all the gang at Coach House for making this possible, thank you very much. Particular thanks also to Stephanie Bolster for the insight and careful readings that first turned this collection of poems into a manuscript; Heather Jessup for poems, friendship and exuberance; Judith Herz for the lessons on forsythia and poetry; Sarah Partridge for the biology facts and continuing conversations; Sara Hall for being the ‘common reader’ who is anything but common; and Lesley Hall for being my personal copy editor. Thanks also to Matthew Zapruder, Matthea Harvey and Christian Hawkey for their poems and support. To Luis Da Costa, who helps me experience words in a different way, thank you.
Thanks to the Canada Council, who gave me a grant to work on this manuscript from January to August 2007.
Thank you to the editors of the journals in which the following poems first appeared: The Antigonish Review: ‘The Certainty Dream,’ ‘Letter to My Father,’ ‘Schrödinger's Cat,’ ‘Insomnia’; ARC: ‘Pascal’s Wager’; The Bedazzler: ‘The Sun Library,’ ‘Survival Machine,’ ‘As Though Sealed in a Glass Jar’; Boston Review: ‘Dream in Which I am Separated from Myself,’ ‘I Invented the Birdcall,’ ‘Dream in Which the Dream is Scaled to Size,’ ‘Antelope Dream,’ ‘Little Essay on Genetics,’ ‘The Shipping Container,’ ‘Quick Tour of the Cathedral’; Colorado Review: ‘Watching a Leaf Fall I Cannot See’; Denver Quarterly: ‘One Point of Reference,’ ‘Vitrine’; jubilat: ‘Dream in Which I am Allowed Twelve Items’; Open City: ‘Remind Me What the Light is For’; LIT: ‘The Lost-and-Found Box’; PRISM International: ‘Variation on a Theme by Lyn Hejinian’; Swerve: ‘A Few Words About the Sea,’ ‘Mynah Speaks,’ ‘Love, Mynah,’ ‘Hearing Mynah I Hear Myself,’ ‘Mynah Flies Off,’ ‘Dream in Which I Apologize to the Birds,’ ‘Dress-up Dream,’ ‘The Birds Enjoy Their Morning Cup,’ ‘Mynah—Last Time,’ ‘Mynah Dreams Himself into a Statue’; Verse magazine website: ‘Overnight a Horse Appeared.’
‘Suspended in the Space of Reason: A Short Thesis’ first appeared in chapbook form, published by greenboathouse books under the title Suspended.
The line ‘manipulating the bodies they ride in’ (in ‘Little Essay on Genetics’) and the title ‘Survival Machine’ are borrowed from Richard Dawkins.
‘Watching a Leaf Fall I Cannot See’ is for Jennifer Cooper.
‘Letter to my Father’ is for John Hall with t
hanks for the jellyfish poem.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Kate Hall’s poems have appeared in journals such as the Colorado Review, jubilat, Swerve, the Denver Quarterly, Open City, LIT and the Boston Review. She has won the Irving Layton Award and the David McKeen Award and travelled on the storied Wave Books poetry bus tour in 2006. She was co-editor of the Delirium Press chapbooks and co-hosted the Departure Reading Series in Montreal, where she now lives and teaches.
Typeset in Montrachet
Printed and bound at the Coach House on bpNichol Lane, 2009
Edited for the press by Kevin Connolly
Designed by Alana Wilcox
Cover art by David Trautrimas
Coach House Books
401 Huron Street on bpNichol Lane
Toronto on M5S 2G5
416 979 2217
800 367 6360
mail@chbooks.com
www.chbooks.com