10 May 21 Guest Poet: Hayden Saunier Dog & Horse etc.

Hang on to your terza rima!  Batten down your poetic hatches! If you haven’t read Hayden Saunier before, you are in for a treat, a few shocks, and perhaps – just perhaps – a seismic shift in your idea of what poetry can be. Horace would not approve. Fortunately, I suspect that Ms. Saunier has enough grit not to care.

My fellow writers frequently label me as a poet of the dark side. I retort that I am not Gary Larson’s half-sister. Ms. Saunier, however, could definitely be his relative, without the sense of humor. Consider the third poem, first – “The One and the Other.” What a mix of pixie dust and unyielding rope! The paradoxes reign, and readers must puzzle out the twain. 

As regular readers of these Monday posts know, I am more than fond of poems about animals, so I’ve included one about a dog and one about a horse. But these poems are so much more than encounters with our fellows. They are the stuff of mystery revealed.

POEMS

Hayden Saunier

14 Degrees Below Zero in the Grocery Store Parking Lot

A dog and I stare at each other

from our separate cars, waiting for our people to return.

He’s a shepherd mix, big head, big ears,

like me, he’s riding shotgun.

Heat blares inside my car,

exhaust plumes from the pickup truck he’s in,

so I know he isn’t freezing but I don’t know

if he’s a he or a she, so I just think he.

He watches doors slide open and closed, open and closed.

So do I.

We look at each other, then back to the doors and I wonder

who will come back first—his owner or my friend?

I watch the doors, then the dog. I watch

two girls walk to their car, chuck frozen A-Treat soda cans

out of the dented trunk, make room for beer.

I look back to the doors, then the dog, and I see

a man in the driver’s seat—his owner has come back!

He’s won!

But I can’t see the dog.

I want to see the dog.

I want to see that he’s happy he won,

even though he didn’t know there was a contest,

even though he might not be a he,

I want to know he loves his owner, even though

I am assuming all this, I assume things, I assume, I do.

I assume he’s a he, I assume his owner loves him,

I assume my friend is coming back,

(milk, she said, just milk).

The man in the truck sits head down, cap down,

rolling a smoke, or checking his phone but

something’s not right. I watch.

I see the stripe on what I think is the man’s cap

turn into the collar on the dog,

and I realize it’s the dog in the truck, not a man in the truck,

it’s still the dog, like it’s still me, waiting,

only he moved over to the driver’s seat. If he’s a he.

I’ve confused a dog and a man. Oh god, I think,

I’m getting carbon monoxide poisoning from a faulty heat vent,

but that’s when my friend gets back in the car

with milk, bread, jello, toothpaste, laundry soap.

She begins a story about some guy at the checkout counter

as she backs the car away from the dog

and the truck and the doors and I’m suddenly sad now,

that churned-up-torn-inside-the-chest-feeling sad

because we’re leaving and I wish I hadn’t won,

I wish he’d won, but he didn’t, I won,

and he might not be a he, and I keep twisting, looking

back, hoping for a glimpse of the owner,

but no one’s walking toward the dog in the truck

who could get carbon monoxide poisoning,

and there’s nothing I can do

but watch as long as I can,

because I need to know that he’s all right,

because we were the same back there,

we were the same.

From How to Wear This Body. Terrapin Books, 2017.

This Horse

(after “Horse,” a cyanotype* in sixteen panels by Carrie Witherell)

Its white bones float

on blue, its meat a ghost

around the bones, an afterimage

pegged to a wall with silver tacks.

*

Whether the blue is the blue

before dawn or the blue after dusk,

no way to know. Magritte blue,

streetlights on, the tidy houses sharp-peaked.

*

This is a puzzle broken

into sixteen squares.

*

What frightens me: galactic emptiness

in the blank eye socket, the awkward articulation

of those ankle bones.

*

Oh, memory of my girl body wrapped tight around the body of a horse!

Hoof beat, heart drum, field, crushed mint, and wind.

Oh, speed and power and heat between my legs

before this has another meaning.

*

All girls have a horsey phase, the Freudians say.

*

I say all skeletons are spectacles.

By which I mean they startle, fill our living bones

with tiny bits of light, exploding.

*

In the bottom of an abandoned silo I found

the skeleton of a cat, curled into a wreath

around its own solitary death.

*

What I don’t want to talk about: the relics.

The men on horseback and their statues everywhere.

The lifted hoof, the cape and sword, the bronze.

*

The glue plant either. Or how cities

used to stink of decomposing horse.

Gutter, ditch and gulley.

*

Back, back, back, back to grassy breath and nose,

curry comb following the curve of flank,

to water sucked from bucket and creek,

to days when I lay like a blanket draped across

a horse’s back, back to the animal

without the bit in its mouth,

the animal, the girl, back, back.

How they nicker through nostril and throat.

How they scare for life.

How they remember.

*

Also: when a horse steps on your foot, it isn’t a mistake.

*

Sorrel, chestnut, palomino, gray, roan, cream, black, dappled, pinto, blaze.

*

I shut my ears to the scientific name for horse, or girl, or blue, or gone.

I chant their colors, turn the hall that holds this horse on end

and place this horse up in the sky, not winged or mythical,

but standing still.

*

Of every bone I make a star.

Hand flat, I offer sugar to the giant mouth.

*Cyanotype is a photographic printing process that produces a cyan-blue print. 

Engineers used the process well into the 20th century as a simple and low-cost 

process to produce copies of drawings, referred to as blueprints.

THE ONE AND THE OTHER

The child hums as he carries, too late,

his grandmother’s sugar-dusted lemon-glazed cake

down the street to the neighbor who needs to be cheered,

too late for the neighbor

who’s stepped into the air

of her silent front hall from a ladder-backed chair

her church dress just pressed, her head in a loop she tied

into the clothesline, too late

he unlatches the gate,

walks up the brick walk on his tiptoes, avoiding the cracks

toward the door she unlocked, left ajar, who knows why

or for whom, if on purpose

or not, but because he’s too late

she’s gone still when he reaches the door and because

he’s too late, as he calls out and looks, brilliant sun

burns through haze

pours through sidelights and bevels

through chandelier prisms, strikes white sparks and purples

on ceiling and walls, on the overturned chair, on her stockings

her brown and white

spectator shoes on the floor

and because he’s too late he remembers both terror and beauty

but not which came first. But enough of the one

that he ran

and enough of the other

to carefully lay down the cake at her feet.

(Rattle #36, Winter 2011)

Background

Hayden Saunier is the author of four poetry collections; the most recent, How to Wear This Body (Terrapin 2017). Widely published in journals, including Beloit Poetry Journal, Poet Lore, RHINO, Virginia Quarterly Review, Poetry Daily, and The Writer’s Almanac, her work has been awarded the Pablo Neruda Prize, the Rattle Poetry Prize, Gell Poetry Award, and nominated numerous times for a Pushcart Prize. Hayden is the founder of the poetry + improvisation group, No River Twice. Hayden Saunier is also an actress known, for example, for her appearance on “The Sixth Sense.” Reports claim that some of her preferred pastimes are reading, learning, Internet surfing, and photography. Interesting that she doesn’t cite writing.

For additional information, visit www.haydensaunier.com

Exploration 1: Ms. Saunier’s biographical details are sparse. If you were to write a brief bio for her, what would it say?

Exploration 2: In “One and the Other,” do you find the story line too obvious? Is this a “good” poem? Consider the definition of “good” carefully.

Exploration 3: Can you unravel the meaning of the last lines of “14 Below Zero in the Grocery Store Parking Lot.”? Does the poet’s comment on the dog and she being “the same” assist in ferreting out the poem’s main proposition? What about the perplexity about the dog’s gender?

Exploration 4: In her work, Saunier is quite facile in moving from dark images to word pictures that enlighten and uplift. Make two columns. Head one “Dark Images” and the other “Images of Light.” Then go through Saunier’s 3 poems, find at least 5 (10 better) items for each column. When you are finished, examine the lists and decide which more closely reflects Saunier’s view on life.