Free Wild Gratitude by Edward Hirsch Page B

power
    of that light and paused beside a young girl
                             sponging her neck, two courtesans
        powdering their shoulders with talc,
                                 kimonos gathered at their waists.
                   Their lips were the color of plums,
                             their eyes were as shiny as porcelain.
    I heard lightning exploding in the distance,
                   a branch cracking somewhere in my mind, rain
    and sleet washing across the tented willows.
                             The wind gusted through the wet leaves.
        And suddenly I found myself staring
                                 at the stark, inky gray profile
                   of an emaciated horse:
                             gaunt and bony, half-starved, a shrunken
    towering remnant of a once-splendid body,
                   that horse was someone I could know, someone
    that I had already known for a long time.
                             It was drawn on a faded handscroll
        by Kung K’ai, a familiar of emperors,
                                 “a strangely isolated man”
                   who had become an
i-min
,
                             a pariah, a late survivor—
    like his horse—from an earlier dynasty.
                   This was the same artist who had once drawn
    large, fearsome creatures racing furiously
                             through the countryside with their nostrils
        smoking and their warlike black eyes
                                 blazing in anger, their coarse manes
                   flying in the mountain wind—
                             and I kept trying to imagine him
    kneeling on the dirt floor of a one-room house
                   patiently spreading out a paper scroll
    on the back of his eldest son, carefully
                             drawing the slow, torturous outline
        of a starving horse, a dying
                                 horse against a vacant background.
                   One gray horse and nothing else.
                             I had seen that stark creature before;
    I recognized its harsh, inhuman profile.
                   And then I was seven years old again.
    I was in the city with my grandmother
                             buying Christmas gifts for my parents
        and the emaciated horse—
                                 yoked tightly to a gilded carriage
                   of wealthy, laughing tourists—
                             was standing next to us on the crowded
    street corner, waiting for a traffic light.
                   The city was wearing its brightest colors,
    but all I could see was the woeful figure
                             of a horse, a gaunt survivor
        from a previous dynasty,
                                 waiting for the light to change,
                   for the tourists to dismount,
                             for the taxis to start moving again,
    for the intolerable burden of its life to stop.
Edward Hopper and the House by the Railroad (1925)
    Out here in the exact middle of the day,
    This strange, gawky house has the expression
    Of someone being stared at, someone holding
    His breath underwater, hushed and expectant;
    This house is ashamed of itself, ashamed
    Of its fantastic mansard rooftop
    And its pseudo-Gothic porch,