CALVARY
John Baldessari, Hegel’s Cellar, 1986
That thick blue line of painter’s tape might as well be holding everything up. The only fact
from the figures,
not the riders lost on top of their horses nor the horses themselves, are that animal bodies
can rest
upon animal bodies and streak across the clearing while those markers of the human spirit—
saddle pads and breastplates,
helmets and spears—get washed out by light. There’s no human way to tell where horse ends
and man begins, even
for the one off-center, hooves caught in the third canter beat while both front legs plant the earth.
Imagine the night
before, those faceless horse soldiers quiet in the campground. A boy, prepared for the daylight
charge, confesses
across the fire that sometimes he’s not sure he’s felt anything that isn’t just some cheap,
useless extension
of the world out there. When I step back, each man is, at most, a finger’s length. The woman
beside me points
to the horse we’re meant to point to, and the man with her laughs. He tells her he read once
that there are no white horses,
only grey ones that lost their color. But she’s hardly listening, thinking of how, as a young girl
she learned what fear was
by feeling under her palm the muscles in the neck of a chestnut mare twitch. He taps the label
with his knuckle.
They’ve put the l in the wrong place, he tells her, and people are just so careless these days.
While he goes on,
she imagines the boy in the etching learned fear this way, too, his hand mistaking a twitch
for simple motion,
and his realization that often we learn things far too late to do much of anything with them
SELF-PORTRAIT: A MONIST BRUSHES HER HAIR IN THE MIRROR
After Ted Mathys
Today, the last touch I remember is lightyears away
& unfamiliar. Stiff, nylon bristles catch on each of
the knots. One summer, my grandmother & I sat on
the concrete steps of her front porch & watched
cows cross the neighbor’s field to ours, the half-year
calves struggling to keep pace with the herd. She
took a fistful of my hair & held its dirty blonde to
the light & said, this color can’t be real, though I
think she meant natural. Once, I had been so sure.
Danielle Kotrla holds an MFA in poetry from Virginia Commonwealth University and is the
recipient of the 2022 Catherine and Joan Byrne Poetry Prize, sponsored by the Academy of
American Poets. Her work has appeared in Blackbird, the South Carolina Review, The Pinch,
and elsewhere. She is currently a PhD student in philosophy at the University of Georgia.
