James Davis May
Ode to a Horse’s Cock
I
It extends smoothly, consistently,
a visible line drawn by an invisible pen.
II
And this is the season of differences.
Daddy has a penis; Mommy
has a vagina, “yes, like you,”
and we say these names
without visible embarrassment,
as if ashamed of the shame we’ve learned
not to believe.
So, midway through our walk,
their pasture being our point of doubling-back,
as we study the four of them—
three chestnut quarter horses, one male among them,
and a malnourished mixed-breed, a rescue,
with a coat that mirrors the cloudy
but warm December sky—my daughter points
to maleness and my wife acknowledges
and, it seems, so does the horse.
III
Some subjects, I keep thinking, aren’t suitable for the page.
IV
There’s Gertrude Stein, for instance, telling a young Hemingway
visiting her Paris apartment that his story is inaccrochable:
“a picture that a painter paints . . . and cannot hang
when he has a show.” Such an effort, she adds
is “wrong” and “silly.” And yet, later in the book,
Fitzgerald confesses to Hemingway that he’s paralyzed
because Zelda told him a man of his measurements
could never please a woman. They leave the table,
go to le water, and Hemingway assures him
that he’s “perfectly fine.” It’s all very tender
when he takes him to the Louvre to look at the statues.
V
The joke I won’t tell would work something like this:
For whatever reason, a painter wanted to paint
the aroused horse he saw in an Appalachian valley,
but was warned and warned that such a picture,
no matter what else he added to it—even the thicket
of desiccated kudzu where finches wintered—
would be inaccrochable, in other words,
unable to be hung. To which he’d respond,
at a cocktail party perhaps, four friends
drinking Sazeracs around him, that you could say
a lot about the subject, but one thing’s for certain:
it most certainly would be hung.
VI
I think of the awful old-fashioned Italian restaurants
that my parents used to take me to in Pittsburgh,
the ruptured pasta shells, the dim lights
over dark red carpets absorbed by the dusty sepia wallpaper,
the ill-fitting, tux-like clothes the servers wore, and yes,
the way they’d awkwardly wield over the pale lettuce
and watery quarters of tomato their oversized peppermills.
VII
In the joke, the painter needs no reason;
the painting, though, if it were real, would not need
so much a motive but a justification; otherwise,
it’s the painting that’s the joke.
So our artist depicts it with bold realism,
half-quoting Courbet to himself before he starts:
“‘I cannot paint an angel because I have never seen one’;
I have, however, seen a horse’s cock.”
VIII
Confirming what it is, my wife says that they grow
and, stage-whispering to me, adds
that they tend to when you talk about them,
and we move on, back up the hill. The three mares
deconstruct their bale of hay, and the male,
having reached his length, stares into the field,
seemingly stunned by the feeling, which,
since he is a gelding, is ultimately
an unproductive feeling, but he doesn’t know that—
and, anyway, our being impressed is a form of praise.
James Davis May lives in Macon, Georgia, where he is writer-in-residence at Mercer University. His first poetry collection, Unquiet Things (LSU, 2016) was a finalist for the Poets’ Prize.