95% of Thoroughbred Horses Descend from Eclipse
I’m walking slowly the way trees walk.
I’m letting my branches slip over steaming coastline.
My bucket, my stick, my good boots.
My eyelids shoot out lightning bolts.
They’re over before anyone sees.
I tie them down with strips of old bed sheets.
If you’ve never ripped up a sizable piece of cotton, try it.
My wolf pal thinks I’m jumpy and says so.
Where hide the really good sifters when we need them?
If you take some yellow and rightly apply it
You can rid yourself of something or other.
This campaign I’m on is addictive.
Close to the vest plays good with some cats.
Someone’s fretting I’m betting on fill-ins.
My twin, my subtle other, my upright shadow,
My me, my myself, My I, I multiply as if
Famines of me are not something to treasure.
–Dara Wier (first published in The Laurel Review)
Dara Barrois/Dixon’s (née Dara Wier) new book is TOLSTOY KILLED ANNA KARENINA
(Wave Books 2022). Others include in the still of the night, YOU GOOD THING, and REVERSE RAPTURE.
A new chapbook, Nine, is forthcoming very soon from Incessant Pipe; other chapbooks, Thru and Two Poems,
have recently appeared from Scram. Lannan and Guggenheim Foundations have supported her work.
She lives in western Massachusetts.
The New York School Diaspora (Part Forty): Dara Wier
Dara Wier’s “95% of Thoroughbred Horses Descend from Eclipse,” declarative and urgent, explores the vagaries of identity—its bloodlines and sightlines—and how we make ourselves through imitation and adoption, “By letting our branches slip over steaming coastline”—a coast both itself and a boat powered by water.
In this poem both “close to the vest” and generous, lines unleash surprises like resurrections: “the way trees walk,” “over steaming coastline,” “lightning bolts.” “Lightning bolts”? The speaker’s eyelids shoot them out. Though they are over “before anyone sees,” she must restrain them “with strips of old bed sheets.” A humorous surprise, the practical inserts itself: “If you have never ripped up a sizeable piece of cotton, try it.” As in everyday life, utility combines with mystery: “Where hide the really good sifters when we need them?” and “If you take some yellow and rightly apply it / You can rid yourself of something or other.” A woman at home is either problem-solver or dormouse, quiescent as a popsicle. There’s always something to be rid of—a flutter of khaki-colored wings, a dark seam rimming the stainless, a psychotic thrum from the fridge. I think of patent remedies, of Earwigs-No-More, M’Lady.
That’s part of why the speaker acts in fits—is “jumpy”—the self or home she is making, that we all make—is provisional, depending on what props we can gather to shore up or restrain. Its genealogy dark, it is always emergent, mysterious as Elizabeth Bishop’s “Monument”; enticing as John Ashbery’s “Lacustrine Cities.” Once we have begun, there’s no stopping: “This campaign I’m on is addictive.”
This is serious play; the rhythm lilts; words call out to one another in rhyme: “Someone’s fretting I’m betting on fill-ins.” The “fill-ins”: “My twin, my subtle other, my upright shadow.”
The penultimate line, with its assertions of multiple ownership, pelts us with questions. Who is behind the “my” of “My me, my myself, My I” that, proliferating, riffs both on idiom and on Arthur Rimbaud’s enigmatic: “Je est un autre.” If we let them, a horde of explanations descend, from Freud down to the most craven self-help tomes—but these are proforma, shallow, and useless.
Too soon, we approach the close of Dara Wier’s towering poem of refreshment and humorous solemnity. The ending’s emphatic back-handedness, “as if famines of me were not something to treasure,” discombobulating in its union of multiple want and our single speaker, releases a simple word, “treasure,” that deserts all conundrum for art’s self-forgetfulness, its gleaming oblivion.
–Angela Ball
Go to Source
Author: Angela Ball
