I need to tell you how I felt in the park this morning when I stood on the frosted grass with my dog as we stared at three wild horses eating these stiff blades. I’ve swallowed worse mouthfuls of winter, but still I need to find better words than worse to describe that open cavity of wetlands they mowed this fall to remove an invasive weed. They cut one tall thing down and made a path for another, so now piles of shit stretch from the park to the streets. It’s fashionable these days to tell the reader a line in a poem is not a metaphor when it’s a metaphor, but forgive my comparisons. I mean I know an omen when I see an omen, I tell the coven of cul-de-sac Karens gathering to grumble about the mess. I mean can we even call it a meeting about the “new” west if some old white guy doesn’t yell at everyone? I can’t blame a horse for where it shits, but I can carry a bucket and shovel and move it to my garden beds. Just ask me about my peppers in August. But for now, I can enjoy, while I shovel, the young horses rubbing their long heads the lengths of each other’s bodies beside an older horse lying against a hill in the early sun. I can enjoy the way she cannot be bothered to even lift her head, and how frost rims the hoof prints in the hard earth. Forgive me, it’s the new year, and last night I cried in the stall of a casino bathroom, but not over money. Forgive me, I put all these piles of words between us because I didn’t want to tell you my wife moved away. She says, I can call anytime I want, but then I’d need words for these feelings. I’d have to explain this season spent walking around steaming piles of manure, and all the places I want to carry them, so that in the spring something could rise like a resolution for forgiveness. I’d settle even for some thorny invasive weed, even if my need for a season shit-flecked with beauty and its brief summer blossoming solved nothing.
Lindsay Wilson is an English professor in Reno, Nevada who has been awarded a Silver Pen from the Nevada Writers' Hall of Fame. His two full-length collections are No Elegies and The Day Gives Us So Many Ways to Eat, and his writing has appeared in The Colorado Review, Fourth Genre, and The Carolina Quarterly.
