The New York School Diaspora (Part Forty-Seven): Allan Peterson [by Angela Ball]

A HORSE REMEMBERS

A horse remembers none of its ancestors

heels ascending to splint bones

        and knows not its namesake in the sea

It cannot see itself through history

as I cannot me for my unknowns

        sunsets pulled down by their long gold wires

my highest calling from way below hearing

        It knows back a few days to an apple

and stands satisfied under a moon under a live oak

        that stands amid histories

cypress cut to stumps magnolias by lightning

        The horse sees the man who would ride her

coming down from the heretofore

with his wherewithal

-Allan Peterson             (first published in Innisfree, 2023)

What a horse remembers is an open question. In the instance of this poem it is memory and expectation. We are all, like the horse, living amid our unknown histories and our emotional attachments that direct our attentions. How we piece together a coherence from our limitations is a thing of poetry which, like intuition, is arriving at a truth with insufficient information. -Allan Peterson

Poet and visual artist, Allan Peterson’s most recent book is This Luminous, New and Selected Poems, (Panhandler Books), a finalist for the 2020 Oregon Book Award.  Some other titles include Precarious (42 Miles Press); All the Lavish in Common (University of Massachusetts Press, Juniper Prize); and Fragile Acts (McSweeney’s), a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. He has appeared in anthologies such as Poetry of the American Apocalypse, (Green Mountains), and in critical essays in Stephanie Burt’s The Poem is You, 60 Contemporary Poets and How to Read Them. He lives and write-in Ashland, Oregon. Website allanpeterson.net

The New York School Diaspora (Part Forty-Seven): Allan Peterson

Allan Peterson’s suggestive and majestic poem, “A Horse Remembers,” moves deliberately, in floating step-backs, to invoke the vastness of that which we cannot apprehend. John Ashbery, an agent of the unknown, wrote ekphrastic poems, including the great “Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror,” that explore the potent complexities of who, what, and where we are. Peterson, a visual as well as verbal artist, writes here what seems to me a new kind of ekphrasis—a contained mimesis and charged stasis in which the poem creates both picture and implication.

First, we enter gaps in the horse’s thought, its biological ancestry, beginning in grass: “heels ascending to splint bones,” and continuing in litany to the lovely and surprising “namesake in the sea,” enlisting a biological past, then a chronological one: “It cannot see itself through history.” Then, the turn to these three lines, so crucial:

     as I cannot me for my unknowns

              sunsets pulled down by their long gold wires

     my highest calling from way below hearing

 The speaker, instead of besting the horse in knowledge, is subject not only to the unknowns of nature, its sunsets engineered by a contrivance of “long gold wires”; but also the unknowns of his own life and its “calling”: an art not high after all, but “from way below hearing.”

Then the poem turns to what the horse does know:

     . . .back a few days to an apple

     and stands satisfied under a moon under a live oak

                that stands amid histories

     cypress cut to stumps magnolias by lightning

 and to its position “under a moon / under a live oak," widening its context in a majestic, storied, and scarified nature.

In “The horse sees the man who would ride her,” the delayed “her” delivers the stab of the personal. A new order is established: the horse,“satisfied under a moon”; the man, with his sophisticated memory—his “heretofore”—and his apples—his “wherewithal”--crude in contrast to the timelessness arrayed before our eyes.

The beginning of knowledge, as in Ashbery’s “The Mooring of Starting Out,” is humility. Allan Peterson’s “A Horse Remembers” enters the tradition of the many great poems that call out their speaker’s inadequacy, placing them not above but below, under our boot soles We arrive at this: what we know holds none of the round certainty of the original apple. There are no givens but mystery.

--Angela Ball

Comments

[Leah Martinson]

<<< The beginning of knowledge, as in Ashbery’s “The Mooring of Starting Out,” is humility. Allan Peterson’s “A Horse Remembers” enters the tradition of the many great poems that call out their speaker’s inadequacy, placing them not above but below, under our boot soles. We arrive at this: what we know holds none of the round certainty of the original apple. There are no givens but mystery. >>> Brilliant.