When in the field, the woman often wrapped herself into a pose called horse. She blocked her face to become the horse’s head as she entwined her arms. Somewhere a list of her broken thoughts wasn’t burned but folded carefully and torn into quarter-strips of cloth, left strewn in the grass where wrens might dip down for nesting strands. The woman was one of the lucky, knowing there’s no need to burn the mind’s errors as some miniature rehearsal for what death might someday obliterate anyway. In horse, it was the full obliteration she practiced, and like all difficult postures, it couldn’t be held indefinitely. She knew this, yet she didn’t want to release it; her face began to tremble as she exerted force upon the posture; she didn’t want to return to herself, which was the exact moment she was no longer fused with horse. Horse had fled for the lower field, where, grazing now on clover, she rippled inside the sound of herself, quiet and light, one leaflet of clover folding over another inside the full of her, and the dark.
Katie Ford is the author of four books of poems: Deposition; Colosseum; Blood Lyrics; and If You Have to Go, all published by Graywolf Press. Blood Lyrics was a finalist for the LA Times Book Prize and the Rilke Prize. Colosseum was named among the “Best Books of 2008” by Publishers Weekly and the Virginia Quarterly Review and led to a Lannan Literary Fellowship and the Larry Levis Prize. International invitations to read and lecture include festivals in Tunis, Morocco, Oslo, and Stockholm. She completed graduate work in world religions, theology and poetry at Harvard University, and, following that, received her M.F.A. from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. Her poems have appeared in The New Yorker, Poetry, The Paris Review, The American Poetry Review, and the Norton Introduction to Literature. She teaches at the University of California, Riverside where she is a Professor of Creative Writing. Please visit www.fordkatie.com for more information.