The Horses: New & Selected Poems

The Horses

162 The horses The actual ride was thrilling enough generic triumph of it horseback through redwood forests galloping on hills overlooking the sea left eyelid scratched by branches an ischial callosity pounded raw sore on the strange insides of my thighs And when I got home from Camp Meeker my mother’s letter was waiting for me telling of Mac’s death how he had called the day before to inquire after Pop said he wasn’t feeling so well himself a “bubble” he couldn’t get rid of how his girlfriend Barbara had entered his apartment after unanswered telephone messages found him sitting on the toilet in his pajamas The two events tangled together Mac rose like some bottom fish in the shining an exultation at first even his dying an end a shape Uncle Mac the family schlemiel 163 unsinkably dimwitted his spark of joy nasal rumbling But there was a muddy suck in Mac’s death narrowness an anger Months later visiting my parents in New York Cousin Joey came to dinner I saw him after twenty years At the time of the ride and the death at my mother’s stern request I had written to Mac’s sons Howard and Joey round phrases to neglected family bright veins in a darkness Now here was Joey fat bald graying sweet and broken as a hamster Joey looked like Mac but slighter still boyish something massive in Mac’s old man’s sloping his head belly the nubbing of his knees And Mac had looked like Grandpa Joseph but thickened homely without the arrowed serenity 164 slim dark handsome of his father Collapsing cups Joseph Mac and Joey Joseph’s namesake I met Joey in the foyer embraced him He was very emotional asked me about myself and I gave him some quick details ended by saying “I love my life” Half true More than half but I omitted the poverty the desperation Joey seized on my words overreacted not enviously so much as with hunger And then he talked talked about himself His mother Mac’s beloved Ruth had died in birthing him and Joey was brought up by his grandfather Ruth’s father Mac off selling on the road His grandfather Joey said was the only one who loved him and when he died Joey was sent off to school He was several times in private hospitals for depression always voluntarily and then in a disturbed debt-ridden time after the breakup of Joey’s marriage Mac had committed him to a locked ward violent ward 165 of Manhattan State Public Hospital After that experience and the legal struggle to free himself Mac Joey said became a terror to him Long separation And when he saw his father again even after many years it was with a certain uncontrolled trembling Revelation like the turning of a gem I had never thought of Mac as a terror to anybody Dark Mac the punisher And oddly as Mac changed in my mind my memory of the horseback ride changed too I remembered the brute intractable head of Dusty my slow safe mare pale yellowish eyes like marbles How big she was brown and gray round sleek horseness of her how hard to set in motion stubborn and heavy-limbed My friends had warned me to be firm she might rebel act up to be careful currying her never to get myself in position to be kicked or stepped on So there was a verge 166 of menace in Dusty her size animal silence I remembered moments galloping when my feet had slipped deep in the stirrups and I felt myself pitched forward off balance too high on her withers no real fear but something in me had entertained falling almost acquiesced Even the landscape when we broke from the flickering of the forest those raw golden hills shaggy sundrenched the sea several miles below covered with low cloud seemed remote in the glare alien The memory ride became a journey into a void the animals the earth a dispossession Some enormous longing Transcending on my bumpy butt the horses the engines 167 As if I could leap up and grab something hold on just by wanting it and naming it But what? And what did that Northern California paradise have to do with...