Poem of the Week | February 06, 2023

This week’s Poem of the Week is “The Horse That Threw Me” by Alexandra Teague.

Alexandra Teague is the author of three books of poetry—Or What We’ll Call Desire (Persea, 2019), The Wise and Foolish Builders, and Mortal Geography—and the novel The Principles Behind Flotation. She is also co-editor of Bullets into Bells: Poets & Citizens Respond to Gun Violence and Broadsided Press: Fifteen Years of Poetic and Artistic Collaboration. She is a professor at University of Idaho, where she co-directs the MFA program. Her poetry and essays have recently appeared or are forthcoming in Boulevard, River Teeth, Blackbird, and The Common, and Oregon State University Press will publish her memoir in essays in 2023.

The Horse That Threw Me

It’s not about climbing back on the horse after the horse
has thrown you if the horse has thrown itself inside you:
the spooked song of bone, the shadow whip. If no
lawn will ever again be free of corners you cannot turn
your head past: periphery of acorn and cedars, long gold
breath of the grass outside the barn: a grave in the field
light leaks through. You will pass to your death again
and again like this: still living as part of you clenches
like a saddle buckle, clinks against itself. What a tangle
of for and into to explain why you loved Equus in college
and would not trail-ride the migraine-bright spring fields.
Didn’t you want to canter beyond yourself? Of course you
did. Didn’t you want to be a centaur made of two whole
animals, not pain and its absence? Some days, nothing
breathes down your neck. The barbed-wire fences are
bare, untufted by horse hair. On the free, green lawn,
only the wind tosses its head and whinnies. You hold
out your hand to it. Appleless girl with an unreadable
future, you could be anyone, your body well enough
to forget. But here the real past catches you, or you
step toward it: the dark wild eyes of it. The musky air.
Wherever the lines of you lead, they’ll circle back:
a song sung as a round: that girl riding a crocodile
your third-grade teacher loved: She sailed away on a
happy summer day on the back of a crocodile. . . At the end
of the ride, the lady was inside. And the smile was on
. . . What a simple tangle irony seems as a child. Again
and again, you’ll pass through your life like this: uneaten,
unable to say when what you thought you were riding
toward your future became the past that rides you.

Author’s Note

Since I was eleven, I’ve lived with periodically debilitating headaches and pain from jamming my C1 vertebrae into my skull when a horse bucked a friend and me to the ground. Although this experience has heavily marked my life—including leading me to decades of chiropractors and yoga— I’ve never written about it. A few years ago, after teaching Mario Chard’s wonderful poem “Caballero,” I gave my students a prompt that included, among its instructions, to “reference a horse or something etymologically related to horses.” A student asked if I had any horse poems, and I admitted I didn’t. When I finally started drafting one a couple years later, the result was a page-long, rhythmic, fairly narrative poem called “The Horse That Threw Me.” I knew the poem was too telling, but after months of returning to it, I couldn’t figure out how to fix it. One night, in frustration, I wrote the first sentence of this poem and then started pulling imagery from the original and recombining it without most of the narrative. I don’t remember the exact intuitive ground rules I worked from, but I made myself keep moving and recombining words and images. The result—quite quickly—became this sort of ghost version of the original, in which I wrote myself to a series of statements that feel torqued and far truer to the accident, and my life and body since, than the narrative ever could.