West Tennessee Horse Becomes Faulkner's New Old Mare, and: Quis Ut Deus, and: The Existence Litany of Whales

West Tennessee Horse Becomes Faulkner's New Old Mare

On the porch there were shotguns within reach—it'd been raining all weekAnd the geese were shitting the yard. This is the kind of stuff you run into here—

That and everybody's got connections, at least through their people. It's why we sitAround some days just to pull all those threads until we find we almost

Already know each other. The man who told me the story, the one who,When he was about twelve, sold Faulkner a horse, later made his money

With a company that made windshields for top-end European motorcycles.He raced them too. He is a nice guy I've met a few times. One day he'll be

On the same plane as you. You'll talk to him and find out you almost knowEach other, but the flight is short, so it's over too soon to figure it all out,

To hear about that horse, dappled and, according to the guy that told meThe story, not much worth a damn. (I can just see him, pulled from the stall

Into the cellulitic mud, that damp thing standing on both front legsAnd one back one—then the other.) Faulkner overpaid, and had his man load

Her onto a trailer with a tire low, so they refilled it at the air compressorIn the granary. The boy knew it was a slow enough leak to take them

Far enough back toward Oxford that he'd never see Faulkner again.The horse didn't seem worth a drive up to Memphis, but he was just a boy then,

Impatient to be old enough to have a Triumph and roll it onto Poplar Avenue.Faulkner was already old, venerated while mumbling to himself as he jotted

Numbers on the wall by the phone in the pantry. I've been to that house,Rowan Oak, and I saw where Faulkner wrote on the wall. It didn't leave

An impression on me though I remember it quite clearly. The cedars in frontWere old things dying with a grace denied to people. The house was like Graceland

To me, a museum. Do you get what I am saying? I can't see that horseWithout imagining the man who bought it, driving all the way from Oxford

To buy a mare that was already old. I wonder how she did moving to Mississippi.                                                                                                I almost already know her.

Quis Ut Deus

iIcy and ancientAs if tense on a snake,

Mic is a profileOf quietness

On the dining table,Gold-coated focal point

Of a still life amongPlastic apples

And pears spilledFrom a blue and white

Porcelain bowl newlyBroken in two.

His puppyhoodBusts up the house

And shits the colorsOf crayons he ate.

iiTen years laterOn his last day

And last hour, his tailLifts and drops

When he sees me throughDilated, cataract eyes.

An oxygen maskLoose over his muzzle

Covers his white gumsAnd browning buckteeth.

He is in the roomWhere people say

Goodbye to pets,But his death

Is arriving too earlyFor my mourning

To catch up to it,And only now

Four months onDoes it begin like

A pitchy terrier's bark.

The Existence Litany of Whales

Their ancestors pressed the muddy ground        And left prints as they walked,

Then swam, toward a source only they remember        Within the vibrating call and response traveling

Across the oceans. Evolution is migration—        A swing moving toward and moving back,

A multi-epochal rhythm, God's quantum jazz        Described in Dirac's equations and archived

In the songs of whales. Something within these ballads        Remembers the beach, the feel of the breeze

On their wet skin, and the big leaves along        The riverbed. Whales sound a terrestrial

Language submerged, one maintaining        The pitch but garbling the syllables

Of their existence litany, in which they...