You Can Lead a Horse to Water But You Can’t Make It Drink*, and: His First Art Lesson*, and: No Answer*

YOU CAN LEAD A HORSE TO WATER BUT YOU CAN’T MAKE IT DRINK*

Memory—ol’ sawbones, nag and crowbait, ol’ gluepot—aren’t you ready for the knackers yet? The horses of Black Sunday on the Edmund Pettus, iron shoes striking the macadam. Hard sometimes to tell a screaming horse from a child screaming, a horse’s hooves from a baton striking a black boy’s back. Horses bite one another to determine their pecking order: nations also. Once, I clung to the neck of a spooked mare as she charged breakneck down a steep slope. Fear tore the reins from my hands. The horse would not be halted or swayed. What lay ahead of us—girl and mare—I did not want to drink: dark bitter water. But I held on. And where is the horse you’ve led, unaware, all these years? Stubborn horse! Is it the water that terrifies? Is it the reflection of a mule when you thought yourself mostly human? Memory’s horse follows me. It refuses saddle, rein, my spurred heel, the tongue’s crop. I have seen horses wearing the faces of women. They come in the night with swollen bellies. They lower their muzzles against my mouth to drink. They draw my breath into their nostrils, my wordless breath that tells them everything.

HIS FIRST ART LESSON*

On the floor of a stable, atop a hay bale,a boy sits, drawing mane, hoof, hock, haunch,muzzle—all the parts and mysteries of horse.He sits, intent and studious in the manure-sweet air,accompanied by the ringing of a farrier’shammer and the low whinny of horses.

The mare that the boy is drawing standshoof-at-rest, its withers ripplingagainst the worrying flies, the long headturned so that its eye stays on the boy.The mare flares her nostrils, drawingthe odor of pencil lead and gum eraser,the salt-sweat of a boy who has comeafter chores, slipping past the hemof his mother’s eye to limn in thick, un-breakable lines, a horse.

Because of the boy’s measuring stare, the marewill not win its next race, or perhaps, becauseof the boy’s eye, she will win. Becauseof the mare’s eye, he can no longer be a boy,or human, or dark-skinned, or anything boundedby nation, by the words get yourself back hereby suppertime. Even the pencil, its knife-whittledpoint, alters, re-shapes the boy’s face, turnshis hand and curls it into a well, a cup, an ear.

NO ANSWER*

Awakened, I hear an owl callingfrom the leaves of a paper notebook. I rise,lift the moss-black cover, and turn the pagesof faded script, but how brittle its spineand weak the binding’s glue, even afterninety years still clamorous with mortar.

the bullets were hiteing all a round our headsand would play on the bob wair.It sound like birds . . .

Black men under a wrought-iron sky, blackbodies ducking under concussions of air,men praying Gawd, Good Gawd.Darkness he tried to reconcile insidea composition book, loss almost small enoughto carry and light enough to store away.

The time were at hand now we all new what it mentto go out in nomanland. It ment nothing but deathto any one that puts his foot in nomanland, and the menlooked at one a nother but not a wird said, all were still.

The faint blue lines on notebook paper are guides.No, the fading lines are drifts of gas, are Pippin’slonely cooty muddy trenches, are lines filledwith improvised syllables and inky blues.But he was proud—know that too (despitethe fires to come, despite the figure he shapedand reshaped from dabbled paint, a dark bodyhung from a darker tree by darker rope, despitethe shrapnel in his words).

We did not...