Moving Across the World on Horses

“Moving across the world on horses / body split at the edge of their necks / neck sweat eating at my jeans / moving across the world on horses.”*



Out in the country. The real country. The middle of Florida, in the Ocala National Forest, where the only restaurant is a Kangaroo gas station. You could stay barefoot for a whole week and no one would notice. Humidity like a blanket. White sand and forest and Coca-Cola lakes.The guy that owned the ranch was a horse thief. Really. He sold people horses and then took them back in the middle of the night and then painted them different colors. They would come back to the ranch and he would say oh no, you’re mistaken. I think he was one of my dad’s only friends, and we kept our horses there. I spent weekends there for maybe two years. I was twelve, at one point, for sure. We would ride our horses all day under the giant oak trees and through blonde fields and sometimes across lakes, and come out dripping and relieved from the summer heat. Horse dust in my mouth. The smell of horses in everything. Even now if I smell horses, driving through the country with the windows down I have this homesick feeling for them. Then I was just a kid, I thought it was totally normal and granted that I would spend my days and nights outside forever. When my dad would go to sleep I would walk around the little ranch. The black lake looked blacker, and even I knew better than to swim in it at night. Horses aren’t afraid of snakes, they have a natural immunity. That’s true. But they are afraid of hogs and pigs. Avoiding the lake, I would walk (barefoot) up the sandy road to the pasture and stay still, wait for the horses to come to me. We smelled each other. When I walked back to the little cabin I would hear them, very quietly though, walking along the pasture, following me. That was our friendship. Recognition and presence. I would go back and sit on the porch and listen to all the bugs. A whole world of creatures making one noise in the night. In the morning we would go ride out again, my dad usually leading the way trying to find some trail he made up in his head. In the afternoons it might rain and I would walk to where the horses were just to see the steam coming up off them, to put my head against their neck and rub their wet fur, both of us probably thinking: I am here. 

*The Collected Works of Billy the Kid by Michael Ongaatje 

Dragging Anchor

When a sailboat drags anchor you wake up in your berth you wake up with the wood around you but you know something isn’t right you’re still in your berth but it’s like when you sleep with someone for many nights and when they turn you turn with them and when they breathe you breathe with them when they get up in the night to pee you feel that they’re missing and you know something isn’t right

so you wake up in your berth and you feel the wood around you and the smell of canvas which isn’t just salt air or age or sunlight it’s sails that carry those things but also time

you know the smell it’s the smell that all your father’s sweaters had and all the beach towels laid out for you in the summer it’s the smell of years on the boat but also something else

you’re in your berth and there’s the wood and the canvas but also the sense of time passing, too quickly, maybe you see the stars moving too but mostly you just feel it, so you get up and leave everyone else asleep you go outside and even in the middle of the summer there will always be that first chill of you alone, above deck, with the rest of the world sleeping and you see that the bow has turned around the wrong way starboard so you pull up the chain and it’s so easy, so light in your hands, and you pull it in and feel the boat really pull with the current now, it could just float so easily out to sea but you look forward and throw really throw the anchor out the other way left to the channel and wait for the anchor to catch and it does- the boat makes a small tug and you’re awake and everyone is still sleeping so why not slip

into the water with the chain, hold onto it and let your body also float along with the current, held against the steady weight of the anchor and see all the little creatures around you light up like magic, your mom taught you the word, phosphorescence 

your first moment that you can remember that was completely yours and years later

your mom is remarried and you aren’t in a ship but in a small house on another river and you want to go into the town to buy pickles so you ask your mom if you can drive and you’re driving and you ask about the journals, the years you all spent sailing, and why her voice isn’t there and why you can’t read them, and it’s not the first time you asked and she says

I burned them 

it terrifies you and you’re afraid to ask and you think about nights you spent awake at night alone, other nights where you’re sure someone should have been awake and who knows

what really happened

but your mom got remarried and you like him and you can all have dinner together in that little house on the river and at night you go to bed and you hear the wind howl and it’s a sound you almost remember and early in the morning she calls your name and you answer, that’s a sound
familiar like the wind, pushing against wood, against canvas, pushing the body of a boat out to sea. 

The wind on the river is different, fierce and Northern and it carries with it the smells of evergreen trees and the haunting mating calls of Loons, their red eyes glowing on the river which you can see from your small window in the house, so like a ship

and you wake up in the middle of the night to its sounds and walk downstairs and the rest of the house is sleeping and still and you know that’s it’s impossible for a whole house to drag anchor.