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She Had Some Horses

I. She Had Some Horses


She had some horses.

She had horses who were bodies of sand.

She had horses who were maps drawn of blood.

She had horses who were skins of ocean water.

She had horses who were the blue air of sky.

She had horses who were fur and teeth.

She had horses who were clay and would break.

She had horses who were splintered red cliff.


She had some horses.


She had horses with eyes of trains.

She had horses with full, brown thighs.

She had horses who laughed too much.

She had horses who threw rocks at glass houses.

She had horses who licked razor blades.


She had some horses.


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.


She had some horses.


She had horses who liked Creek Stomp Dance songs.

She had horses who cried in their beer.

She had horses who spit at male queens who made

them afraid of themselves.

She had horses who said they weren't afraid.

She had horses who lied.

She had horses who told the truth, who were stripped

bare of their tongues.


She had some horses.


She had horses who called themselves, "horse."

She had horses who called themselves, "spirit," and kept

their voices secret and to themselves.

She had horses who had no names.

She had horses who had books of names.


She had some horses.


She had horses who whispered in the dark, who were afraid to speak.

She had horses who screamed out of fear of the silence, who

carried knives to protect themselves from ghosts.

She had horses who waited for destruction.

She had horses who waited for resurrection.


She had some horses.


She had horses who got down on their knees for any saviour.

She had horses who thought their high price had saved them.

She had horses who tried to save her, who climbed in her

bed at night and prayed as they raped her.


She had some horses.


She had some horses she loved.

She had some horses she hated.


These were the same horses.




II. Two Horses


                   I thought the sun breaking through Sangre de Cristo

Mountains was enough, and that

                                                           wild musky scents on my body after

            long nights of dreaming could

                                                        unfold me to myself.

                 I thought my dance alone through worlds of

odd and eccentric planets that no one else knew

       would sustain me. I mean

                                                     I did learn to move

                                                                                       after all

    and how to recognize voices other than the most familiar.

           But you must have grown out of

                                                                      a thousand years dreaming

               just like I could never imagine you.

                         You must have

                                                    broke open from another sky

to here, because

                             now I see you as a part of the millions of

     other universes that I thought could never occur

        in this breathing.

                                       And I know you as myself, traveling.

   In your eyes alone are many colonies of stars

                                                              and other circling planet motion.

                                           And then your fingers, the sweet smell

                                            of hair, and

                                                                 your soft, tight belly.

       My heart is taken by you

                        and these mornings since I am a horse running towards

a cracked sky where there are countless dawns

                                                      breaking simultaneously.

There are two moons on the horizon

and for you

                     I have broken loose.




III. Drowning Horses


She says she is going to kill

herself. I am a thousand miles away.

Listening.

                   To her voice in an ocean

of telephone sound. Grey sky

and nearly sundown; I don't ask her how.

I am already familiar with the weapons:

a restaurant that wouldn't serve her,

the thinnest laughter, another drink.

And even if I weren't closer

to the cliff edge of the talking

wire, I would still be another mirror,

another running horse.


Her escape is my own.

I tell her, yes. Yes. We ride

out for breath over the distance.

Night air approaches, the galloping

other-life.


No sound.

No sound.




IV. Ice Horses


These are the ones who escape

after the last hurt is turned inward;

they are the most dangerous ones.

These are the hottest ones,

but so cold that your tongue sticks

to them and is torn apart because it is

frozen to the motion of hooves.

These are the ones who cut your thighs,

whose blood you must have seen on the gloves

of the doctor's rubber hands. They are

the horses who moaned like oceans, and

one of them a young woman screamed aloud;

she was the only one.

These are the ones who have found you.

These are the ones who pranced on your belly.

They chased deer out of your womb.

These are the ice horses, horses

who entered through your head,

and then your heart,

your beaten heart.


These are the ones who loved you.

They are the horses who have held you

so close that you have become

a part of them,

                          an ice horse

galloping

                 into fire.




V. Explosion


The highway near Okemah, Oklahoma exploded


                                                           They are reasons for everything

Maybe there is a new people, coming forth

                         being born from the center of the earth,

                         like us, but another tribe.


Maybe they will be another color that no one

                         has ever seen before. Then they might be hated,

                         and live in Muskogee on the side of the tracks

                         that Indians live on. (And they will be the

                         ones to save us.)


Maybe there are lizards coming out of rivers of lava

                         from the core of this planet,


                                                               coming to bring rain


                         to dance for the corn,

                         to set fields of tongues slapping at the dark

                         earth, a kind of a dance.


But maybe the explosion was horses,

                                                          bursting out of the crazy earth

near Okemah. They were a violent birth,

flew from the ground into trees

                                                         to wait for evening night

mares to come after them:

                        

then into the dank wet fields of Oklahoma

then their birth cords tied into the molten heart

then they travel north and south, east and west

then into wet while sheets at midnight when everyone

                         sleeps and the baby dreams of swimming in the

                         bottom of the muggy river.

then into frogs who have come out of the earth to

                         see for rain

then a Creek woman who dances shaking the seeds in

                         her bones

then South Dakota, Mexico, Japan, and Manila

then into Miami to sweep away the knived faces of

                         hatred


Some will not see them.


But some will see the horses with their hearts of sleeping volcanoes

and will be rocked awake

                                             past their bodies


                                                   to see who they have become.

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Joy Harjo

Joy Harjo (/ˈhɑːrdʒoʊ/ HAR-joh; born May 9, 1951) is an American poet, musician, playwright, and author. She is the incumbent United States Poet…

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