She began to draw a picture for a friend she had grown distant from. The drawing required a landscape with a village in the far distance and, in the foreground, a farm that produced hay. As she sketched a haystack, she realized it could be seen through, like kindling stacked with air, even though it was filled completely by her pencil. She could see this was inaccurate to haystacks, so she sent herself to study their making. She watched a quiet film of stackers forking into orchard grass—rye, or sometimes timothy or fleum—as they pitched it into piles around a wooden pole the height of two stackers. This sounded like the brushing of a horse’s tail, or its tail swishing, or both, or maybe she heard a horse and its tail because the raking was now behind her mind, where she walked toward a horse inside of a stable. She had never been in a stable until now. She had watched the stackers a long while, remembering her friend had said it wasn’t safe to climb haystacks, people had been injured badly falling from them, even if they knew the stacker and their skill. It might be dense and packed for winter feed, yet always there was instability. This aligned with what she was learning about solids, their vibratory nature and the space inside all matter, even between oneself and oneself. She traced sometimes in a notebook not meant for anyone else to see, and at the top of one page she had written permanent home. Looking at it now, she saw the house was scratched in thin pen, with hatchings and cross-hatchings, as if it lay sleeping, like a dormant prophecy, inside the closed book. The home’s doorway was all darkness recessing into the farthest notebook distance, which couldn’t been seen. The doorway was impossibly small! Yet what she felt was enormity.
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.