All the poems in my book Funny have an old joke in them; often, as here, in the first lines. This one is a particularly simple old joke, but it raises perennial questions. I wrote it when I had to make a big decision and I was staggered by the importance of it, and terrified to the point of misery.
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Horse Makes a Decision
Horse walks into a bar, orders a scotch. Bartender says, “Hey, why the long face?”
It’s who I am. Once I was coltish for a while I was a bit of a mare; I can not sit to the right of myself at the bar; I cannot opt to step over into something else-ness. This is my long strange moment of uncertainty, that I can bend from what I am. This is the hangdog of doubt.
Horse walks into a bar, orders a scotch whiskey; wishes she still smoked cigarettes. For a while, she muses, she was a bit of a stallion. It’s no longer the central question. Why the long face? Well why the idiocy of hope? The faith that these plans of ours come through the way we want them to, despite the way things generally go.
Born to brood? No, not the horse. Yet long-faced with the weight of chin and everything else. I protest, it is not just a matter of learning to say Yes. Or is it? The jaw jut, the taut face, downturned corners of the lips, mulling over even the ability to choose. Is this blind groping choosing?
Horse walks into a bar orders a scotch and soda, but gets a coca-cola, asks for a do-over, but it happens again and again. Horse is crying now, bartender lending his towel to it, a drinking buddy starts grooming her mane. But there is nothing for it. The simplicity of it, the grace of the question is that she has to answer it
alone. Horse goes into a bar in tap shoes, does a few numbers. Horse collapses into the corner, on comes the spotlight, in comes the orchestra, and suddenly she’s singing us her blues. Don’t know why, there’s no sun up in the sky. Stormy weather.
Horse walks into a bar to get out of the rain, to make a decision. Bartender says, Why don’t you like Art Nouveau, why do you want children, why do you listen to so much Dylan, what made you come in here today, out of the sapphire blue?
Horse says, I don’t know, her jaw set low. These are the constraints of my nature. This is my face. I confess, I had hoped to be free.
***
The letter/post Love Explained previously presents one of the poems from my book Funny.
When I get to the words “Don’t know why, there’s no sun up in the sky, stormy weather,” I like to sing it.
It’s a poem mulling over how free we are in life to make our own decisions, outside the pressure of expectations. The horse “has a long face” (an expression meaning that she is sad), because she has a long face. When I wrote this poem I was trying to decide whether or not to have children, which is why that question is tucked in there. So it wasn’t a long face, IRL, but it was a set of bodily and social facts that seemed to be determining what I wanted and what I was going to do with my life. Was I going to have children just because that fits my form?
Creating a family with my husband, John, seemed obvious, except not. For one thing, I’ve never been the most cis-gendered nor straight person and was scared by the idea of embodying femaleness in the necessary gravid way. That’s why the poem opens with owning that I have been both a mare and a stallion, and that used to be the central question, but now there’s a new one.
One of my favorite moments in the poem is when the horse keeps ordering a scotch and soda but getting a coca-cola. I was mostly talking about how you don’t control what you get, but it was also to do with the fact that when you are pregnant, you don’t get scotch and soda, you get coca-cola. All of us are controlled by what people like me usually do, that is, by social expectations, and that truth only gets tighter when you have children.
For a woman who is a scholar and artist, and who lives on a planet that’s over-teeming already, well, a baby sounds like an iffy proposition.
It’s sad and comically dramatic when the horse collapses in the corner and “suddenly she’s singing us her blues.” She has given up, collapsed, and yet is asking herself how performative all this is, given that she’s seen this angst before, in real life and depicted on screens.
Stormy weather is a metaphor for sadness that is so common it’s almost invisible as metaphor. Like the horse’s face the black-cloudy sky is a natural fact not a site for human meaning, but we can’t help ourselves.
The poem is usually long and thin like a horse’s face, it’s been resized for this venue.
One more thing, I did have children, two, and it has been the best thing ever. Some of my fears came true (early on there was pain, and gender distress, and limitations on adventure), but so what, those things are as nothing compared to the good. They are such interesting people. It’s been strange and unpredictable and full of wonder.
I think when I went ahead and did it I was 100% wanting children and I was 80% No Bad Idea, Trap! and we just did it anyway and it worked out. I don’t recommend that decision making method, I’m just looking at how the plot gets advanced if we are all so careful. Horse knew at the end that she both wanted children and felt coerced by her body and her culture. At the end she is mostly thinking about how life works and she is a little melancholy about it. Horse believes in free will, dismisses determinism, but marvels at how constrained we are.
There’s something about jokes that mirrors our lives. The rational set up and then the turn from expectation into the punch line that is life, the ridiculous, the unknowable, the absurd, and the sublime.
I recently read this poem in a packed little space - the Red Room upstairs in KGB Bar -at a friend’s book launch. Now I can’t get it out of my head, ergo this letter.
***
Okay, Dears, that’s your Wednesday letter. It’s sunny in New York today, I hope wherever you are you can get some of that brightness on your face. April is the cruelest month because so much of the world is happy, even the plants, so if you are among the dead that do not return with a little sunshine, it can be depressing. But by late May I hope even those in hard times can feel a little of the optimism of sap rising, all the green, and the vines taking over the scene. Start a project, finish one, or nap in the sun both now and then. Stay both safe and wild, don’t kill yourself, and I shall return to encourage you again.
love,
Jennifer
One of the beauties of poetry, your poetry, is that snapshot of -an absurdity of the heart- the heart. The heart, the mind, the joke- all present, timeless, here, now. Unsettling questions that like to pretend to be answered in biographies but not in poetry 💕💕
Oh thanks I love this and you