My Accomplishments
Insisting on the truth
does not serve the painter.
Five hundred horses run
down the trail of blood and then
five hundred horses run it again.
I did this. Took my own photo,
painted over my eyes, listened
closer. And then I put in my earplugs.
I met a million horses. I married
very few of them.
Despite the power of the mind
who can say who marries or how or why
or where horses do. Marriage is
a friendship for hire.
Like most jobs, it’s not the only gig around.
I consulted the ancestry.
I ate the American carbon
of my ancestors’ pickles.
I returned to a memory, deleted its strangulations.
Focused on the coke bottle, the glass table,
the crash just off-camera.
With a wrought baby
spoon in my ankle, a teething
bracelet in my thigh,
I hid from the responsibility of aging.
I made four thousand horses live
with a paintbrush. When I finish
an accomplishment I do not spread widely
the whinnies of my success.
I pretend I am evolved past congratulations.
Brushing my mane and tail.
Double-dipping the warmonger god.
***
Author photograph by Juliette Boulay
