#MIDDLEBURY
this sad little enclave of horses
Julian Talamantez Brolaski
of all the lines of all the subway cars in all of new york city
we walk into the one with a corpse
it just puts everything into prescription for us
as jason stackhouse says
alabaster turning into crystale
nantaa nde telling me unsaddle yr horse
means to take off your hat
I love it when people use words wrong
like repertoire for rapport, like when
brenda said she had a good repertoire with her students
or cynthia saying she wouldn’t spend an exuberant amount of time
or when nick says anything anymore
the elk antlers are blood-brown
if we can find them on this mountain
edith says she has found
skeletons of bucks who had died
antlers entwined together
on the way to JFK you pass
this sad little enclave of horses
there was no way to assess the land, or the landscape
n/t was real about it.
perhaps by the sides of the railroads s/times,
a hint of the old ways
the river could be … a source of tension
a jackass painted like a zebra
from the ghost’s perspective it’s not humid
when bojack horseman vomits up all that cotton candy
long forgotten poisons
smallpox, ricin, the bacteria that causes
the plague
the way that crows remember
the faces of their adversaries
Louise Michel held sick horses in the street
Nietzsche’s last act
was to embrace a horse
the taxi driver who hinted
of his dark past in nyc
wiped his hands together in the universal
gesture of sloughing a thing off
About this poem
“One day my best friend and I walked onto the A train and there was a dead person on it, or a person who appeared dead, with a sheet covering them. Everyone ignored it. And I was thinking about our willfull obliviation, the anesthetizing lure of homophony, people who don’t take their hats off in restaurants (or maybe ‘unsaddling your horse’ is an anachronistic nicety), the way the horses in Central Park have morphed into mere emblems of our ‘quaint’ history.” – Julian Talamantez Brolaski
About Julian Talamantez Brolaski
Julian Talamantez Brolaski is the author of “Advice for Lovers” (City Lights Books, 2012). Julian is a poet and musician who lives in Queens, N.Y.
The Academy of American Poets is a nonprofit, mission-driven organization, whose aim is to make poetry available to a wider audience. Email The Academy at poem-a-day@poets.org.
(c) 2016 Julian Talamantez Brolaski. Originally published in Poem-a-Day, www.poets.org. Distributed by King Features Syndicate.
