BOY LEADING A HORSE

                 - Picasso, 1907

​

by joseph fasano

 

                       

 

Banishment is everyone’s story—

 

and if you, too, had come a long way

through the desert;

if you, too, had come a long way

 

through the one rough country of your own life,

what would you bring with you

if not your own death,

 

dignified in its invisible bridle?  What would you have

that hadn’t carried you?

 

Say it:  Once

you were a child in the wilderness.  Once

 

you pressed your own face

to the wild thing, its dark heart

 

like a hymnal in the wind’s

hands, and asked it, in clear tones, where it was going.  Once

 

you kissed the blank script

of the lash.

 

Say it:  If the world had broken you

like a great colt, if the world had knelt you

 

deep into the soil of your own life,

would you not lay

 

your great face in the red earth?  Would you not say

what has no shadow has no way to love?

 

Love, we have come this far

through our own lives.  We have carried

 

our hearts like tattered

saddles.  Madness

 

is a music only one can hear.  Madness

is the great mane

 

on your shoulder, turning you

toward a bare and troubled country, and no one

 

in the torn thorn

of that blankness.

 

Say it:  Once

you lay, a great mare, in the wilderness.  Men came

 

and sat there on their saddles,

watching you in the cold throes

 

of your labor,

old snow darkening their shoulders.

 

You have carried

the filly of your one life.  You have carried it

 

through the mad heart

of this land.

 

Tell it.  Tell it.  Tell it:

 

The darkness speaks
to each of us in the beginning.
It holds our hearts
like a wild thing in its bridle:

 

I promise, it says,

you will not be given shelter.

I promise you
these three things
as you enter:

the deep green

and the mad hands of your breakers—

And the moments you're delivered
from your own ghosts
like a filly in the fillymaster's hands.