Jodie Hollander's "Two Horses"

Thoughts on epiphanies (and horses).

Two Horses

Macedon Range, Australia

There is no happiness
like the happiness of horses.
Just look at these two beauties
moving through this landscape—
who has sent them to us,
and from what other world?
Today I'm watching them
meandering together
beside the Acacia trees.
As they pause to eat grass,
I see their long tails 
swaying in the sunlight,
and I wonder what they know
of life that I don't know.
I've seen them stand for hours,
it doesn't really matter
whether the rains are coming,
or if that familiar darkness 
will soon be on its way.
Seeing them here today
under this vast Australian sky
it finally dawns upon me:
my life is more than enough,
to be alive is a blessing.


from Nocturne (Liverpool University Press, 2023)

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I love the stunning surprise of a book I’ve never read before. I first read this book, as has happened lately, while standing next to the poetry shelf at the public library, after having plucked its slight, softly violet, almost hidden spine out from between two other books. I flipped to a poem titled “Lilacs” that began:

As if God sent them to stop me
from my thoughts and said:
instead, try these...

Such lines could serve as the opening for a poem that, like an ars poetica, describes the act of reading. As if God sent this book to stop me from my thoughts and said: hey my friend, try this.

And so I kept reading — this time, a poem titled “Fishing in the Spring,” which began:

Still, there must be things left
for us to see, even if only in a book

Again! Much like before! A poem! That reminds me! Of what it’s like to read! Poems! Perhaps Hollander has invented a form here — an ars lectio of sorts, a kind of art of reading, something that explores that nascent pleasure that inevitably arises out of the act of being surprised by the very fact of encounter. A feeling once thought dormant. The simple and supreme awe that comes with wonder. The pleasure of light where there once was dark.

And so, long story short: I checked out the book and brought it home with me, hoping — as happens often, without fail, small wonder that is, the certainty of uncertainty — to be surprised. And I think surprise — the fact of it, the joy of it, the wonder of it, and the way it arises out of something as ordinary as attention — is part of what I want to talk about today.

You would be forgiven if, like me, you read this poem and thought — not just because of its final words — of James Wright’s “A Blessing,” a poem I have framed on the wall of my classroom.

It’s there, in a little frame off to the left, under a page ripped out (sorry) of Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God, a page that contains a single paragraph that is one of those paragraphs I’d describe as perfect, a paragraph that begins “So Janie waited a bloom time, and a green time and an orange time,” and ends “Janie’s first dream was dead, so she became a woman.”

Anyways, Wright’s poem is a poem that begins:

Just off the highway to Rochester, Minnesota,
Twilight bounds softly forth on the grass.
And the eyes of those two Indian ponies
Darken with kindness.
They have come gladly out of the willows
To welcome my friend and me.

I think of the first lines of today’s poem:

There is no happiness
like the happiness of horses.

And I think, after reading these lines, of their echo in Wright’s poem, which is a kind of mirror-echo, an echo that holds the same weight but flips the feeling:

They ripple tensely, they can hardly contain their happiness   
That we have come.
They bow shyly as wet swans. They love each other.
There is no loneliness like theirs.   

How could that be? That horses have a happiness and a loneliness like no other? think it could, simply, be. I don’t question it. I imagine it is true.

I love how these two poems talk to one another across the years. I love that they serve as examples that the well of poetry is unending, that we live in a world where the depth of what we don’t understand and yet are still inspired by is so great that two horses can stand in a field and be met with the gaze of two different poets many years apart and bring such minds to blessings and blossoms. But what I love most is the fact that both poems serve as examples of epiphany (which is a kind of surprise) by way of attention. Both poems frame the image of these horses, and they offer a great deal of attention to such beautiful objects of attention. Hollander writes of “their long tails / swaying in the sunset.” And Wright writes:

Her mane falls wild on her forehead,
And the light breeze moves me to caress her long ear
That is delicate as the skin over a girl’s wrist.

And Hollander, by way of one line — “I’ve seen them stand for hours” — lets us know that her speaker, too, who is a kind of witnesser, has also stood for hours. And has watched. And listened. And seen.

I say all that to draw your attention to the way both poems end.

Here is Hollander’s ending:

it finally dawns upon me:
my life is more than enough,
to be alive is a blessing.

And here is Wright’s:

Suddenly I realize
That if I stepped out of my body I would break
Into blossom.

These are poems of careful attention interrupted, finally and suddenly, by epiphanies. They are, in this regard, some of my favorite kinds of poems, though I think the phrase kinds of poems is a bit reductive. Still: a poem that offers such close attention to something — a field, two horses standing in it — that is then stunned into revelation? Maybe that’s all I want out of a life. Maybe those are the best examples of life doing the thing it does best: shattering the daily mundanity of an afternoon with a ray of light that holds the dust so tenderly in the air that I have to believe, finally and suddenly, that there is something beyond description happening here. The magic of feeling without words. The magic of being made humble by awe, and then thrown into blossom because of it.

Rilke offered me, perhaps, my first example of such a poem, with his “Archaic Torso of Apollo,” — a poem that stares, for thirteen lines, at a headless sculpture of a god, and then ends:

You must change your life.

And then there is James Wright’s “Lying in a Hammock at William Duffy’s Farm in Pine Island, Minnesota,” which plays, I think, with Rilke’s form, and lingers for twelve lines in a hammock, fixing its gaze on butterflies (bronze ones, rather than the marble of Rilke’s statue) and cows and horses and pines, before ending:

I have wasted my life.

Or there’s Raymond Carver’s “Happiness,” which drinks its morning coffee and looks out the window and then offers, suddenly, a single-worded sentence that prefaces its ending:

Happiness. It comes on
unexpectedly. And goes beyond, really,
any early morning talk about it.

It comes on / unexpectedly. An epiphany of sorts, isn’t it? A surprise. Yes.

And I think, finally, of Linda Gregg, whose poem “There She Is” stays horribly fixated on a ghostly spectacle of violence, and then ends:

My God, I think,
if paradise is to be here
it will have to include her.

The phrase My God does wonders here. It brings to mind the spiritual nature of epiphany, but also the horror of it — how surprise can stun us toward both joy and terror. But the wonder, too, of this poem, is in the lines that precede the ones above:

I think
I am supposed to look. I am not supposed
to turn away. I am supposed to see each detail
and all expression gone.

Here, just like in Hollander’s poem, which lingers for hours with horses, and Wright’s poem, which does the work of stepping over the boundary and joining the witnesser with those who are being witnessed, Linda Gregg looks, and keeps looking. She doesn’t turn away. And such attention gives rise to the surprise of epiphany.

I think, in such moments, of the often-prescriptive advice that has become cliche in writing workshops. I think of the way teachers often talk about things like endings being earned — as if an ending must pass through a series of tests in order to be of a certain merit. That word itself — earned — is a word of meritocracy, a word that implies that there is a good and a bad, or that there is an ending that is the result of work and an ending that is the result, perhaps, of something like laziness.

I could see a reader coming to a similar conclusion with today’s poem, or with any of the poems mentioned above — that their endings arise too suddenly, even, one might say, out of thin air. That they are not earned. But I think such a conclusion would be unfair. I think such a conclusion neglects what attention does for us, and what it doesn’t do for us — how attention does not accumulate like money, or credits, how it does not narrow our vision, or pinpoint it toward the correct conclusion. Instead, attention is an action we engage in that, through great intentionality, widens our perspective. It is a window opening. It is a room we keep walking into. It does not consume or accumulate. Those words are carnivorous. They eat things that then disappear. But attention does not do that. Instead, it broadens. It expands. And, in so doing, it lets the light in. More and more. We, in turn, are expanded. And there, in that act of beautiful oh my gosh-ness, something surprises us. We realize something. Something comes on unexpectedly. The poem ends with such epiphany. But our lives don’t. They go on.

And, my god, is this kind of ending-by-way-of-epiphany a beautiful thing to encounter. It reminds me of life. It makes me giddy. It throws the whole fucking door open. It says I am not finished. It says I have not come to all of my conclusions. It say there is still room for something here. It’s why, among many reasons, I read.

I felt struck, while reading Kyle Chayka’s Filterworld, a book that describes how algorithms have flattened our culture, about something similar to what I am thinking of today. In that book, Chayka links the idea of surprise to one’s sense of taste, arguing that “surprise…is a fundamental element of taste.” He writes:

[T]aste indeed must be deeply felt, requires time to engage with, and benefits from the surprise that comes from the unfamiliar…

Later, he frames this depth of thinking as antithetical to capitalism:

Consumption without taste is just undiluted, accelerated capitalism.

Chayka makes the ongoing point that our digital world, full of algorithms, reduces our capacity for this feeling of surprise that leads to taste. We don’t spend enough time with things, and, as such, our lives feel so determined. There is an absence of depth; it has been replaced by a flatness, a shallowness. In one paragraph, Chayka names how this flatness leads to despair:

The possibilities that we perceive for ourselves—our modes of expression and creation—now exist within the structures of digital platforms. The consequences of such anxiety include “algorithmic determinism, fatalism, cynicism, and nihilism,” [Patricia] de Vries wrote. It builds to a sense that, since we users cannot control the technology, we may as well succumb to the limits of algorithmic culture and view it as inevitable. Many users have already entered such a state of despair, both dissatisfied and unable to imagine an alternative.

In other words, our experience with the internet — and the algorithms present within it — have made our actions feel more determined. One might say that, in such a world, things feel more certain, and not less. And though we sometimes think of certainty as good, this certainty we experience is a certainty that manifests as blandness, or sadness, or despair. It is a certainty, really, of loneliness. In a world of algorithms, the things we encounter are based on previous encounters. They are the opposite of the result of attention, which is an act of broadening. Instead, what we encounter in this digital age is the result of consistent narrowing. Here, then, are the real endings that are earned. They are endings not of surprise, or wonder, or awe. They are endings of mere and sad expectation. Who wants that? Fuck the earned ending. Give me the ending of surprise, the one of epiphany. Give me the ending that goes suddenly or unexpectedly or my god. Give me the ending that seems to arise out of nothing but really arises out of everything: two horses in a field, and my body, in this world we share, finally realizing that I am not alone. And then, the opening: all of the bursting, sobbing, joyous, can of beautiful worms that follows.

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Some notes:

1. I started following Workshops 4 Gaza, an organization of writers putting together donation-based writing workshops and readings in support of Palestine. You can follow them here and get more information about them here.

2. I’ve been following the work of the Gaza Sunbirds, a Palestinian para-cyling team also doing work to share resources and support relief efforts in Gaza. You can support their efforts to compete in the Para-cycling World Championships here, and also support their ongoing work in Gaza here.

3. Consider donating to the work of Doctors Without Borders to support their ongoing work in Gaza.

4. As I will continue to mention, Writers Against the War on Gaza has been a powerful resource that has, in these days, reminded me of all the various potentials for solidarity in this moment. You can follow them on Instagram here. Here, too, is a link to the New York War Crimes page — their ongoing publication.

5. If you’ve read any of the recent newsletters, you’ve perhaps noticed that I am offering a subscription option. This is functioning as a kind of “tip jar.” If you would like to offer your monetary support as a form of generosity, please consider becoming a paid subscriber below. There is no difference in what you receive as a free or paid subscriber; to choose the latter is simply an option to exercise your generosity if you feel willing. I am grateful for you either way. Thanks for your readership.