The Horse Returns

Woken from a dream, deep
as a black lake—
a familiar silhouette appears
in the doorway on the first
day of the new year,
my daughter, born in the horse
year, comes into our room,
afraid of the lightning
flashing in the high windows,
the whip-crack of thunder.
She crawls in between us
as she hasn’t done in years—
never has she known a storm
like this. The clock says
it’s the moment of the horse,
the eclipse that ushers in the year.
Bright fissures in the sky
illuminate the room as she burrows
in, her long, thin legs uncertain
as a foal’s, and cold against mine.
Lightning striking a person is rare,
my husband says. You have to be
the highest point for miles.
I remember my first raging
storm. I was near the same age
when I went to my mother
for the last time.
So, I lie awake, listening
to her breath as it softens,
the rain between thunderclaps
in the just-born year.

*

Challenger

The day the space shuttle exploded
over and over, its gray debris falling
like the feathers of a struck bird,
back down to earth,

I watched in one of the millions
of classrooms darkened
for the occasion,
our desks semi-circled

around a wheeled-in television
as the nation’s collective gasp
dissolved into breathless
silence, the bright

comet-stream of failure
unfurling in real-time.
And Mr. Warner,
eleventh grade English,

who had made it to the final
round of the competition
to be the teacher sent up
on that doomed flight,

slammed his fist down hard
on his desk, a guttural
cry escaping him
as he shot out of the room.

The rest of the semester,
after the explosion
of his rage—
against the government,

against incompetence
in all its myriad forms—
had been extinguished, only grief
loomed over the classroom

he mostly kept in darkness,
allowing us to do as we pleased
as he leaned back, staring up
past the ceiling.

Because what’s the point of anything
once you’ve seen the ashes
of a dream so nearly grasped
fall like a spent firecracker over the ocean?

Nineteen-eighty-six emerged again
the other day, with news of divers
pulling from the sea
a panel of that spacecraft.

While this week, another rocket
is readied for takeoff. NASA says
that soon a woman astronaut
will set foot on the moon.

I haven’t seen Mr. Warner in years,
but today at my kid’s school assembly,
on the playground on a windy
November morning,

I’m remembering him,
and for the first time in decades,
hand over my heart
like a child, I recite

the pledge, lips moving
silently as if in prayer
as I gaze up at the chalk rubbing
of a daytime moon, half-full.

*

Geometry

was simple, surprisingly,
as even the basic math classes
hadn’t been. So easy
that the thick-as-pigshit
footballers came to me for answers.
I tutored a few, enjoyed unparalleled
popularity, though most were content
with a crib sheet on their laps,
or bobbing up and down
behind me in the back of the room.
I was great at intersecting
shapes, they all praised me.
And there were moments
when it appeared, the geometry
of the sacred, clicking into place
and lighting up like a power grid
on the ceiling above us.
The rhombus, I knew instinctively
the parallelogram, the isosceles.
I remember it so clearly: that little study
room behind the library. I look into it now
as if it were an enchanted egg,
and there I am, shining
as I instruct two corn-fed boys
how to triangulate.
I got not one but several A’s that year.
But then came algebra, the numbers
nothing like the angles. I couldn’t
solve for x, didn’t know why the y
kept changing, kept jumping
around on the page,
but the worst thing was that nobody
came to me for the answers
I didn’t have anymore.

*

Jackleen Holton’s poems have been published in the anthologies “The Giant Book of Poetry”, “California Fire & Water: A Climate Crisis Anthology”, and “Steve Kowit: This Unspeakably Marvelous Life”. Honors include Bellingham Review’s 49th Parallel Poetry Award. Her poems have appeared in Cimarron Review, Poet Lore, Rattle, The Sun and others.