Kay Ryan, "All Your Horses"

Kay Ryan's "All Your Horses" opens with a familiar but singularly unpleasant situation. "Say when rain / cannot make / you more wet." You're soaked: your clothes, your flesh, your bones. It is uncomfortable, miserable, and strangely grand all at once. Like you are the butt of a joke no less than cosmic. All the same, could you drown? Perhaps you consider this unlikely, but I remember the sudden and intense rainstorms in Dallas. Initially, I walked outside and then a bucket was dumped on my head for 10 minutes straight. It didn't seem dangerous, just really annoying. Later, I was caught on the highway when this happened. Rain which doesn't stop has a Biblical edge.

Ryan juxtaposes the impossibility of getting wetter with the experience of overthinking. "...[A] certain / thought can’t / deepen and yet / you think it again: / you have lost / count." Sure, this does not seem fatal either, at least at first. But you know what your mind does when it obsesses with no end in sight. You're trying to get water out of the stone, doing research on a topic composed only of scraps. It's a domain you could be king of, if there were anything in it. Or you're replaying the moments the relationship broke, over and over. If only I said... did... had the chance. It's not necessarily fatal, but it isn't living. You're stuck. You don't know where you are. "[Y]ou have lost /count." Flooded, the problem isn't quite that you skipped 1135 and instead jumped to 1136. It is more that counting is as simple as recognizing what is in front of you. Making an accounting. And that is gone.

We are brought into the thick of a crisis, one with nearly imperceptible beginnings but severe consequences. This is where Ryan wants to leave us; she posits a thesis of sorts. "A larger / amount is / no longer a / larger amount. / There has been / a collapse; perhaps / in the night." We do not know the difference between progress and repetition. "There has been / a collapse," and even though it is our own mind at stake, we don't know when it happened. Maybe we don't know if it happened. Why has the poem brought us to this situation, this peculiar juncture of flooding, thoughtlessness, and collapse?

All Your Horses (from Poetry)
Kay Ryan

Say when rain
cannot make
you more wet
or a certain
thought can’t
deepen and yet
you think it again:
you have lost
count. A larger
amount is
no longer a
larger amount.
There has been
a collapse; perhaps
in the night.
Like a rupture
in water (which
can’t rupture
of course). All
your horses
broken out with
all your horses.  

Why are we here, stuck with a thought that doesn't seem to deepen? To be sure, the poem has not abandoned us. It stands there, like a box, asking us to ask. When I first wrote on it eleven years ago, I played with two themes relevant to the dissertation I was writing. One was an idea from Plato pertinent in Socratic thought: what exactly is calculation? You can intuit, from the theory of forms, that mathematics does not quite have the same connotations for the Greeks as for us. We get the joke of the Republic much more easily. Socrates says that just as shadows have an object which casts them, mathematics indicates there are higher objects, e.g. the forms which are the truth of reality. So I wondered about Ryan speaking of the inability to count, the larger amount being useless, the feeling that water could rupture. She hearkens to a time when calculation isn't about doing math in abstract ways, but about one's ability to engage the world. In the poem, that ability is forfeit because we're treating a deluge as potentially new. We're treating sameness as if it is difference. Calculation has little to do with keeping exact count or using a formula. It has nothing to do with amassing more of the same and calling it wealth. It has everything to do with the mere recognition that something is not something else.

The problem, then, is we don't really know what depth is. We just know we're stuck, if that. Thus, the second theme, that of creation. Isn't Ryan describing a situation afflicting those who enjoy making things? We've all known the poet who can't stop writing the most banal love poem over and over, putting their desperation on the page and stage so pity can get them what they want. When dissertating, I wondered a lot about Socrates as a genuinely unique figure in human history. There were philosophers before and after him, of course. But the Socratic life hits the core of what it means to be a philosopher in such a way that the others are judged relative to him. What, then, was his peculiar depth? The project of constantly defeating unsound ideas about virtue, power, or the acquisition of knowledge does seem repetitive.

That's what I thought about eleven years ago. I'm not sure Ryan's poem has a direct answer, but it is part of another process. It stands there and asks you to ask. It puts you in the moment where you're soaked, thoughtless, and maybe just a bit more aware something has collapsed. Because it stands there, you must build around it. That building has to start with the fullest sense of one's affliction.

Hence, the imaginary, self-imposed aspect of the affliction: "Like a rupture / in water (which / can’t rupture / of course)." If you start noticing what's wrong, you notice you're being struck with different slings and arrows. Your mood isn't all your Mom's or ex's fault. You act up in a mild way to someone who is out to get you and they take full advantage. You do something good for someone but they could care less, so it is thrown back in your face. Water can't rupture; you've flooded yourself; it's not all the same. A gentle reminder to yourself that bad things can get good results and that good deeds can very much be punished serves as the sign you need to observe more carefully and react accordingly.

And finally, the titular heart of the affliction: "All / your horses / broken out with / all your horses." The desire for inane repetition is a want of spirit. Horses are pure spiritedness. This hearkens back to classical ideas but is self-evident to anyone who cares to leave the house for a minute. (I realize that there are many who wouldn't nowadays.) What you need, most of all, is a horse. You've got the kingdom but it is flooded. Not even deeply. You can't trade it and it's not important to try that anyway. Just find a horse–find somewhere you want to ride to–and enjoy the ride. Get away from whatever you were accumulating, certainly not collecting or gathering.