A Poem by Jodie Hollander

In Santa Barbara

To weep in this bold sunlight
must be the most painful thing.
For here where sea and sky
and trees and flowers meet,
one thinks perhaps of rest,
one thinks, even, of happiness—
Nevertheless the horses
have found me once again.
Haven’t I boarded up that barn,
fixed every hinge and window,
sealed up the stalls so that
no horse may ever break free?
And yet the walls, the walls,
how they warp over time.
I used to go for years with hardly
a thought of the barn.
But these days it’s my fate
to care for this dilapidated place.
Even if I set the entire thing on fire,
even then would I still find them,
shiny and muscular,
and somehow always still there—
still breathing in the darkness.

Jodie Hollander’s work has appeared in journals such as The Poetry Review, The Yale Review, PN Review, The Kenyon Review, Poetry London, The Dark Horse, The New Criterion, The Rialto, Verse Daily, The Best Australian Poems of 2011, and The Best Australian Poems of 2015. Her debut full-length collection, My Dark Horses, is published with Liverpool University Press in the UK and Oxford University Press in the US. She currently lives in Fort Collins, Colorado.