Margaret Draft's "Colic"

Thoughts on loss and horses.

Colic

He found it in the pasture, 
pulse fast, pawing hay.

He stood over the still
moving body, watching it turn

in the folds of wet soil, 
and after hours of contemplation, 

decided to give it sleep. He waited
one more day before burying it. 

*

What do you do when a horse dies?
You hollow out the land, 

you try to make enough space, 
and when you think you have enough,

keep digging. 
He said this because 

he himself had to enter the hole
with the horse and shovel, 

shift the legs, reposition the head.


from Nowhere There Was a Lake (Four Way Books, 2024)

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I read this poem while standing up in a bookstore, next to the shelf I had picked the book from, my finger touching it along the top of its spine and then inching it along at an angle back towards me. This is a thing that often happens. Me standing up in bookstores, flipping to a page in a book just inched off a shelf, and reading a poem. I’d recommend it.

And so, I read this poem and said oh.

I said oh in the aftermath of the poem’s asterisk, as I descended its final lines.

I said oh when Draft writes:

when you think you have enough,

keep digging. 

And I said oh when the poem ends:

He said this because 

he himself had to enter the hole
with the horse and shovel, 

shift the legs, reposition the head.

How does a poem do this? How does it reposition your own relationship to your own life, to the world? Taking you gently by the head and saying no, look at it this way? How? This poem does this in a few short lines. It asks a question: What do you do when a horse dies? And then it answers it with a sense of literalness that expands and expands and expands. It says what we lose is bigger than we think. It says to hold all of what we lose, we need more space than we can imagine. It says dig. It says keep digging.

There is a tenderness to this poem today that I think is part of the how of it. The poem’s opening lines are an honest depiction of a moment, grounded in three distinct actions that begin three distinct sentences: He found…He stood…He waited.

The poem then turns from the grounded nature of these actions to the simple, innocent wondering of a question:

What do you do when a horse dies?

It is as if we asked the question, isn’t it? We, reading this? And perhaps — like it felt for me — it felt, for you, like you became a child again, the you of you, the one hollowing and trying and digging, keeping up with someone older, someone who knows what to do with some unimaginable loss that you have experienced for the first time, someone you may have looked up to, even admired. And so you asked. It feels that way for me. As if I asked. What do you do when a horse dies?

And then the poem answers, with the ending that makes me go oh. With an ending that makes me stand still. With an ending that makes me reckon, impossibly, with the impossibly massive nature of loss. The horse in the grave. The grave too shallow. The way the man has to enter the grave himself. Has to stand with what he has lost. Has to hold what he has lost one more time. Has to readjust. Has to do this one more time before he can grieve. Has to dig the shallow grave a little deeper. That grave. This grave. The grave I am digging. The grave you are digging, too. The grave I am standing in. All of us, together now. Standing together. And digging. Keep digging. My god, keep digging.

Perhaps I felt so drawn to this poem, in part, because I am reading, for the first time, Cormac McCarthy’s All the Pretty Horses, which, just about every other page, is shot through with some kind of trembling-lightning prose that details, as if by the flash of a camera the size of the sun, in a single freeze-frame, the soul-shaking beauty of the world as it is, even in the midst of violence or destruction, and certainly in the midst of men. For the most part, these moments have something to do with horses.

Here is the first one of those moments, only a few pages into the book, when the novel’s protagonist, John Grady Cole, who you already feel heavy with the burden of something deep within his soul, despite his youth, or perhaps because of it, perhaps because of everything that feels too big to understand when you feel too small to understand it at all:

The boy who rode on slightly before him sat a horse not only as if he’d been born to it which he was but as if were he begot by malice or mischance into some queer land where horses never were he would have found them anyway. Would have known that there was something missing for the world to be right or he right in it and would have set forth to wander wherever it was needed for as long as it took until he came upon one and he would have known that that was what he sought and it would have been.

Isn’t that special? This sense that, without something beloved, this person would know that he was without. This sense that, even without meeting that which he loves, this person would know that he loves. Beautiful, beautiful, beautiful. To feel the absence of something before it is even found. It is like this poem in reverse, isn’t it? The massiveness of the grave, and how it is already dug, and how you find yourself looking for what you will have to fill it with, so that you can love that thing for as long as you can before you say goodbye. And know, with your whole heart, how well and how deeply you would love it.

And then, later in the novel, John Grady Cole falls asleep. And here is what he dreams of, in a single sentence that moves like a murmuration of starlings across the not-yet-filled sky of the blank page:

That night he dreamt of horses in a field on a high plain where the spring rains had brought up the grass and the wildflowers out of the ground and the flowers ran all blue and yellow far as the eye could see and in the dream he was among the horses running and in the dream he himself could run with the horses and they coursed the young mares and fillies over the plain where their rich bay and their rich chestnut colors shone in the sun and the young colts ran with their dams and trampled down the flowers in a haze of pollen that hung in the sun like powdered gold and they ran he and the horses out along the high mesas where the ground resounded under their running hooves and they flowed and changed and ran and their manes and tails blew off of them like spume and there was nothing else at all in that high world and they moved all of them in a resonance that was like a music among them and they were none of them afraid neither horse nor colt nor mare and they ran in that resonance which is the world itself and which cannot be spoken but only praised.

My god. This world that cannot be spoken but only praised. Yes.

I think now: what an absolute pleasure it is to read, isn’t it? How, in one single sitting, you can read a poem that balances so strikingly on that fine line between life and death, in that invisible space where wonder is, and then you can read a paragraph with seven million uses of the word and and not a single comma, a paragraph that runs headlong into the world like a long dress gathered up by hands for an eternity. And how both — the poem and the paragraph — can be these soul-stirring things that make you feel like you cannot move or that you must move, must rush somewhere, find a horse to ride, run at the top speed until the wind peels back the fine hairs along your cheek.

To be moved, I would say, to be moved at all, whether to joy or sorrow, whether to some unshakeable sadness or some happiness that no made thing could contain — is there anything better?

That’s how I feel now, reading this poem today and reading these words about horses. I, simply put, feel. What a gift. And I keep returning to this moment:

You hollow out the land, 

you try to make enough space, 
and when you think you have enough,

keep digging. 

To make space in this world is an act of great care. It’s an impossible thing, too, isn’t it? And sometimes it is a limited thing, too. You make the space you can. You tend the field you have. Small though it might be. And yet, you try. You set the table for whatever your family looks like. You hang up the poster that has fallen down in your classroom. You take out the glassware. You pour the wine for your good friends. You write one more page. You write another. When you are ready, you ask someone to listen. You listen. You make the space of your heart through the open door of your ears. You hollow out yourself, sometimes, to make room for someone else. They live inside you, alongside everyone you love. There is a room we are each making to hold people, and sometimes we make the same room, and we hold the same people, and it is beautiful. And sometimes we make the room to hold ourselves, and we bunch up our legs and wrap our arms around our knees, and we hold ourselves, because we only have room for how heavy and how large our sadness feels. And sometimes the room we make is for what we have lost. And they come into the room and sit down, and stay there for awhile, and we stay with them, and we call this room grief.

And so, when you think you have enough, keep digging. When you think the world has stopped, know that it has not. When you think that loss is all you are, open the door to let life in. When you think the room is full, know that you can invite one more person. When you think that life is over, just take one more breath. When you think the night has come, know that morning is coming soon. When you think you have enough, keep digging. The room you are building to hold all that you will inevitably lose can be wonderfully large. Loss is a testament, in many ways, to what you love. And what you love is impossibly great, almost too impossible to hold. And still we try. You spread your arms wide. This much, you say. Wider, I say. This much, you say. Even wider, I say. And you spread your arms wider. You spread them all the way wide.

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