Transparent Horses

Lately, I’ve been slipping in the shower. At the drop of a ligament, I slide and muscle my knees back into place. Every chronic anxiety I have soothed by my mom: “Remember how Gung Gung always says: Everything will be okay?” As if he were the lonely inventor of all optimism. Still the doctor’s adage: when you hear hoofbeats think horses, not zebras. (Mom and Yee Ma always say it is good to have a doctor in the family).

Pwa Pwa, a horse in the zodiac. The night before she stopped eating I dreamt I was pregnant with a long-legged foal. The stick legs poked from my swollen belly, and when I aborted it I woke up crying, thinking I had lost something. Helping write her eulogy I saw Polaroids of her posing next to the Ulysses S. Grant statue (A sword in one hand and his steed’s right leg lifted). I learned her in retrospect: where to come from, and how fast you can leave.

The horse, a prey animal, depends on flight as its primary tool of survival. To be a prey animal then is to survive a litany of trials: tests of error, and of gentleness. To live with terror passed down in the blood. (When being chased never look over your shoulder). Most of the time I can stand steady, shampooing blind until my joints bend back. They are too flexible, and too long. Unlike a clean break, the load-bearing errors cannot be retrained.

The same week Pwa Pwa got admitted to the hospital for her slow-crumbling back I started to have chronic migraines again for the first time since I was twelve. My right eye throbbed, blurred, and became untenable in its socket. The Chinese adage, right eye twitching brings disaster. The American idiom, a horse is poetry in motion. There is no saying that it is good to have a poet in the family. A horse is too strong for its bones, all muscle on top, then none at all. A remarkable piling of momentum onto a skeleton like spun sugar. When those legs break, they can never heal over.