RESTLESS HERD

SOME THOUGHTS ON ORDER—IN POETRY, IN LIFE

- DIANE SEUSS

I

She had horses who danced in their mothers’ arms.

She had horses who thought they were the sun and their bodies shone and burned like stars.

She had horses who waltzed nightly on the moon.

She had horses who were much too shy, and kept quiet in stalls of their own making.

—from “She Had Some Horses” by Joy Harjo

WHEN I think of order, I think of horse statues.

As a child in rural Michigan, I covted them. They could sometimes be found at Goodwill, and a couple of times, on a birthday, I received a new one from a family friend. I housed my collection on a special wooden shelf my dad built before he died. It sat on the floor. Low. Kid-level. Boarded there, they were objets d’art. Taken out to play, they became real, but more than real, expressions of the Platonic form of “horse.” I brought them onto my bed and bent my right knee at an angle in which I could pretend they lived in a cave, and I their lone human connection. Each horse was its own being, of course, each with its particular musculature over which light played from my bedroom window. Together, the sum of the separate entities was more than its parts. On each was tied an invisible rope that tethered them to the word horse, the idea of horse, and to