Says Jake Skeets, “In this desert, I will // light the hardened meadow with a technology so ancient we call / it language.” In other words, welcome to the Anthropocene. One of the signs that it’s all getting a bit “Anthropocenic” would be “: when the only thing you can touch is a plastic raft / and drenched between the hours is a cutting board / as in a place for garlic / and onions the face of early sky”.
To be able to see the sky on a cutting board is, perhaps, an example of pareidolia, the human instinct to perceive patterns. Skeets seems to see a vast pattern that weaves through time, connecting human and animal, the ancestral and the descendent. His poetry collection Horses is patterned around the numbers two, four, six and twelve; numbers that have significance in the Diné creation story as humans emerged through the four worlds. Skeets demurrs in the book’s notes section, “I’m not a fluent speaker of Diné and I want to be clear as to not posit that I am somehow a scholar, in any sense of the word, of Diné worldview or linguistic structure. I, in fact, know nothing. I am learning though and these poems helped me.”
These poems help us all, Diné or not, to conceive the potential of a unified worldview that holds technology alongside what we call nature as if neither could be a rupture from the other. Technology can be a metaphor for natural phenomena just as easily as the other way around. Dig into the earth, and you’ll see that “the dirt beneath has teeth / root and stem / television static.” The sky can be found in a cutting board, and also we can find ourselves outside in an arid landscape “… hunched over like a comma // studying the way a landfill // can be mistaken for a sky.” Names and naming are one of the earliest technologies, which is one reason why it’s important for a poet like Skeets to seek the Diné names for things, and also to know that naming is dynamic and is not one-to-one. The resonances in names connect disparate ideas and events. “He said my name is really an aquifer, an aster field, / an orchestra of damp tarps in a sheep corral, a downed pole / in Rocksprings.”
Structurally, Horses is divided into four sections, only one of which is explicitly about horses. The horses in question are dead; they are part of a feral herd that, in 2018, made its way into a stock pond on the Navajo Nation and became mired in deep mud. The Navajo Nation has been experiencing drought conditions and desertification, a loss of rain, and a faltering of long-established cyclical weather patterns. The poems in Horses make a lot of space for breath, for wind and dust and sand. The patterning is that of the sand dune, appearing natural. To the extent that some poems are formal, the forms feel inevitable, not imposed. The imposition comes from the air—from its moisture content, its currents, the mathematics of wave formation.
Horses is Skeets’ second collection, following his 2019 release of Eyes Bottle Dark with a Mouthful of Flowers, which was selected for the National Poetry Series. Horses explores some of the same material as this earlier work, including themes of queer desire and of reservation realities where pick-up trucks wend through ancient landscapes layered with memory. Horses is a gentler work, less in-your-face with its images, where the violence is not so much a smack as an integral part of the cosmos.
That’s not to say that the subject matter is easy. The book’s epigraph quotes from the third and fourth stanzas of Emily Dickinson’s “I felt a Funeral, in my Brain,” zeroing in on the moment in the poem where oceanic feeling overwhelms the writer—the high point, as it were, of breakdown. Just because Horses chooses to inhabit the high ground doesn’t mean it isn’t falling away on every side. This is the Anthropocene, and “somewhere in a canyon on the roadway a sudden river / is washing away god // we become lightning sometimes and there / only then become song, carry our aches, its kick pull haul hull / become dark cattle a body of water the mouth around light / dark clouds leaping into a cold wind.” The moment where, in Dickinson’s words, “… Space – began to toll,” is not a comfortable one.
The earth, perhaps, is seeking a new equilibrium. It isn’t as simple as saying that we’re out of harmony. The sound of a dying horse has a hymn within it, or at least has the echo of the word—“hymn hue whole // howl whim wind” heard in that long whinnying. The Diné word “hoozhooh” and its inflections also breathes in this way, and holds meaning along the lines of “to become (be) peaceful, to become (be) harmonious.” Similar again in sound is the word “hoots’aa’,” provisionally translated by Skeets as “there is a depression (in a surface, as the ground).” If we, as readers, can be brought to connect all of these concepts—death, desertification, harmony, the hole in the ground where the horses lose their footing—and hear in it the tolling of the heavens’ bell, we may find a way of living on the crumbling slope of change. If that’s too grand, if it’s too much a wishful reading that risks overwriting Skeets’ aims, well, here at any rate we find good poetry, words that in their combinations open a space to see, to take breath, to imagine “the water of the next world” where “a stronger wind / will bring along the storms, their dresses heavy with time.”