Don't Leave Hungry: Fifty Years of Southern Poetry Review

The Flying Change; The Muse Once More

H E N RY TAY L O R The Flying Change 1. The canter has two stride patterns, one on the right lead and one on the left, each a mirror image of the other. The leading foreleg is the last to touch the ground before the moment of suspension in the air. On cantered curves, the horse tends to lead with the inside leg. Turning at liberty, he can change leads without effort during the moment of suspension, but a rider’s weight makes this more difficult. The aim of teaching a horse to move beneath you is to remind him how he moved when he was free. 2. A single leaf turns sideways in the wind in time to save a remnant of the day; I am lifted like a whipcrack to the moves I studied on that barbered stretch of ground, before I schooled myself to drift away from skills I still possess, but must outlive. Sometimes when I cup water in my hands and watch it slip away and disappear, I see that age will make my hands a sieve; but for a moment the shifting world suspends its flight and leans toward the sun once more, as if to interrupt its mindless plunge through works and days that will not come again. The 1970s ❚ 41 I hold myself immobile in bright air, sustained in time astride the flying change. The Muse Once More I take the air, the sun, my ease, letting things go for a while, as the dog blunders from my feet to the curb and back. The words in the book I am holding recede, waver into illegibility; the air trembles with jet planes, birds invade; it is one of those days when nothing at all can go wrong. Across the way, I see my neighbor lurching onto his lawn with some machine a rug shampooer? No, he straps a box to his side, fastens earphones to his head, and walks his lawn, sweeping before him the sensitive disc of a metal detector. What in God’s name is he looking for? It is ten-thirty; he ought to be at work. But neither am I, so I do not hail him. Back and forth, back and forth he trudges over the spongy grass, swinging the handle, his head cocked for a signal whose meaning I cannot guess. A lost earring, perhaps, or the tap to the water meter; no relics lie in this developed earth. The sun moves higher overhead; he sweats, walks on, and in my own head I begin 42 ❚ The 1970s to carry that heavy intentness, waiting for the whine that will let me know I have struckwhat? The cars pass on their various errands, snapping the asphalt bubbles, and I doze here, dreaming that something lies under a suburban lawn, waiting to change my life, to draw me away from what I chose too long ago to forsake it now, on some journey out of legend, to smuggle across the world’s best-guarded borders this token, whatever it is, that says I have risked my life for this moment; do not forget me. Whatever this makes me, accept it; by this let me be known. And my neighbor walks on, hunting the emblem that will tell him who he is now or might once have become. I will not wait to watch him find it; let it be the lost treasure that turns his head on the pillow as he drifts, as I do, toward sleep, out of the life he has chosen. The 1970s ❚ 43 ...