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“I was born with eyes that can never close...”
― Joy Harjo

“Remember you are this universe and this
universe is you.”
― Joy Harjo, She Had Some Horses

“and this ache
this trembling ache
haunts me endlessly
like you.”
― Joy Harjo, She Had Some Horses

“I thought my dance alone through worlds of
odd and eccentric planets that no one else knew
would sustain me.”
― Joy Harjo, She Had Some Horses

“I can't do anything
but talk to the wind,
to the moon
but cry out goddamn goddamn
to stones
and to other deathless voices
that I hope will carry
us all through.”
― Joy Harjo, She Had Some Horses

“Vision

The rainbow touched down
'somewhere in the Rio Grande,'
we said. And saw the light of it
from your mother's house in Isleta.
How it curved down between earth
and the deepest sky to give us horses
of color
horses that were within us all of this time
but we didn't see them because
we wait for the easiest vision
to save us.

In Isleta the rainbow was a crack
in the universe. We saw the barest
of all life that is possible.
Bright horses rolled over
and over the dusking sky.
I heard the thunder of their beating
hearts. Their lungs hit air
and sang. All the colors of horses
formed the rainbow,
and formed us
watching them.”
― Joy Harjo, She Had Some Horses

“Moonlight

I know when the sun is in China
because the night shining other-light
crawls into my bed. She is moon.
Her eyes slit and yellow she is the last
one out of a dingy bar in Albuquerque�
Fourth Street, or from similar avenues
in Hong Kong. Where someone else has also
awakened, the night thrown back and asked,
'where is the moon, my lover'?
And from here I always answer in my dreaming,
'the last time I saw her was in the arms
of another sky'.”
― Joy Harjo, She Had Some Horses

“We get frantic
in our loving.
The distance between
Santa Fe and Albuquerque
shifts and changes.
It is moments;
it is years.
I am next to you
in skin and blood
and then I am not.
I tremble and grasp
at the edges of
myself; I let go
into you.”
― Joy Harjo, She Had Some Horses

“But you must have grown out of
a thousand years dreaming
just like I could never imagine you.
You must have
broke open from another sky
to here, because
now I see you as a part of the millions of
other universes that I thought could never occur
in this breathing.
And I know you as myself, traveling.
In your eyes alone are many colonies of stars
and other circling planet motion.”
― Joy Harjo, She Had Some Horses

“I release you, fear, because you hold
these scenes in front of me and I was born
with eyes that can never close.”
― Joy Harjo, She Had Some Horses

“What I Should Have Said

There's nothing that says you can't
call. I spend the weekdays teaching
and moving my children from breakfast
to bedtime. What else, I feel like a traitor
telling someone else things I can't tell
to you. What is it that keeps us together?
Fingertip to fingertip, from Santa Fe
to Albuquerque?
I feel bloated with what I should say
and what I don't. We drift and drift, with
few storms of heat inbetween the motions.
I love you. The words confuse me.
Maybe they have become a cushion
keeping us in azure sky and in flight
not there, not here.
We are horses knocked out with tranquilizers
sucked into a deep deep sleeping for the comfort
and anesthesia death. We are caught between
clouds and wet earth
and there is no motion
either way
no life
to speak of.”
― Joy Harjo, She Had Some Horses

“The Poem I Just Wrote

The poem I just wrote is not real.
And neither is the black horse
who is grazing on my belly.
And neither are the ghosts
of old lovers who smile at me
from the jukebox.”
― Joy Harjo, She Had Some Horses

“My heart is taken by you
and these mornings since I am a horse running towards
a cracked sky where there are countless dawns
breaking simultaneously.
There are two moons on the horizon
and for you
I have broken loose.”
― Joy Harjo, She Had Some Horses

“These are the ice horses, horses
who entered through your head,
and then your heart,
your beaten heart.

These are the ones who loved you.
They are the horses who have held you
so close that you have become
a part of them,
an ice horse
galloping
into fire.”
― Joy Harjo, She Had Some Horses

“Oh, you have choked me, but I gave you the leash.
You have gutted me but I gave you the knife.
You have devoured me, but I laid myself across the fire.”
― Joy Harjo, She Had Some Horses

“something echoes
all forgotten dreams”
― Joy Harjo, She Had Some Horses

“You took me once
to an older part of earth
I'd never seen�
where monsters were born
and killed.
They sacrificed everything
and nothing
for a taste of this
life.”
― Joy Harjo, She Had Some Horses

“Untitled

Either a snail's moist web
of moonlight, or someone's
hot breath at four a.m.
when the night has been
too much, has eaten
you whole.
This is my life.
It has been
sifted through the bones
of my body, through
blood.
It is all that
I have.”
― Joy Harjo, She Had Some Horses

“Or maybe you are my own life
scheming desperately to climb
back in.”
― Joy Harjo, She Had Some Horses

“She had some horses.

She had some horses she loved.
She had some horses she hated.

These were the same horses.”
― Joy Harjo, She Had Some Horses

“earth, sky, stars circling
my heart”
― Joy Harjo, She Had Some Horses

“Sometimes it is like
facing the dreamer
who knows the you
of blood and starsâ€�”
― Joy Harjo, She Had Some Horses

“There is a field
of talking blood
that I have not been able
to reach,
not even with knives,
not yet.”
― Joy Harjo, She Had Some Horses

“I
study and read poems and try to put
myself in them.”
― Joy Harjo, She Had Some Horses

“Raw red cliffs that you
stumbled down into your own shadow
haven't kept you away, or soft
red lights and strange electrical
music that I play.”
― Joy Harjo, She Had Some Horses

“I am always
in danger.”
― Joy Harjo, She Had Some Horses

“But your half-grin
is the only image that comes clear.
All the words lead to that”
― Joy Harjo, She Had Some Horses

“Her escape is my own.
I tell her, yes. Yes. We ride
out for breath over the distance.
Night air approaches, the galloping
other-life.

No sound.
No sound.”
― Joy Harjo, She Had Some Horses

“These are the ones who escape
after the last hurt is turned inward;
they are the most dangerous ones.”
― Joy Harjo, She Had Some Horses

“Some will not see them.

But some will see the horses with their hearts of sleeping volcanoes
and will be rocked awake
past their bodies

to see who they have become.”
― Joy Harjo, She Had Some Horses