JOHN HORVATH JR
Biography of the Soul

Horse pasture. Stallions graze grasses
as did sires who among aging mares are
giant remembered, heat of fence, gallop
and saunters near perfect and sudden.

Herdsmen. In the pasture, they wear
hat and boots (as if the village streets
were mud) because their fathers had.
They do not think of it. They work.

This vast plain of grass and seldom tree
was Eden once. Pure found, its beauty
beckoned into timelessness.

A church. Iconostas of a hundred saints
all now related through mother's blood,
and mine still sits in publican prayer
to bring some peace to family unseen.
Broadcast as the seed of grass when
no one watches for continuance.

Place unswerved measures man whether
rebel, fool, or common trance; genetic
farmer at his fields, millwright at his flour,
commoners as all were once who walk
streets of mirage gold, death row miles.

Victory over time women in communities
keep, changing vista with changeless
grace: a citizen is mother's tongue, her
dreams dreamt in a son's dream; he
cannot wake nor cannot walk away.

I cannot walk away. How leave hands
that gesture as she had or use hands
to end our separation or turn toward
some nice vision of the world as if
I had been born immaculate, her self-
sacrifice. There must be dreams from
which one cannot walk away. Christ-

man knew it. Wept upon her choice
made for him: an accident of birth is
“Thy Will Be Done” and “It IS Ended”
regardless who speaks these refrains.

I know this as one knows of breath –
I am her untrained son and, yet,
I factored the crucifix, distributor
of crimes against humanity. I am
no less the stowage of the ship
in which slaves slept. I am no less
demon stoked the furnaces of death.

The keeper of the shower stalls
with gas, gangster, child birthing
child; the villain of all violence. I am
the woman with the swollen womb
unwanted, the doctor who ends that
life; I am what he had been to him
one night; and she to her. The venal
and the murderous onslaught, the slut,
the druglord and the drugged I am what
was for them as much as I am what
I am and must become and had been

once.

The stallion - history, the sword of time,
the one lost moment - mine, the past
forever in the child alive as in those
who gave it birth. Thus, Paris burned
and plundered lies beneath my thighs;
the continent in movement is movement
that I make; from where I stand, seasons
and the corners of the earth stretch out;
the center of the shape of things I am;
round me and mine wherever is my blood,
THERE is my present and my past,
the future deemed suitable for me.

Unless I act in order not to act; sever
from me hands that touch not right,
tongue that corrupts words of love,
feet that walk me into miseries. Unless
I act in order not to act; accept this
bag of sinewed bones
      and thoughtlessness as worthless
heap. Refuse to act, to react, stand
ground like some old rock that takes
the blade, releases it, that loses some
to sharpen it, and yet remains solid
rock as it was
once.

Drunk on sweet Arpadhon wine
among West Florida tourists
ignorant of the movement
of their blood

and the crisp white stupidity
of slogan torn t-shirts
. It is some devilish thing
that Jews have known,
a Covenant with God;

and, yet, I am no Jew
nor have I been
at any place in time.

An Israelite without that history,
a Zionist who dreams that dream,
yet, I have not been of them nor
have my kin. A dream I had
dreamt
once.

It is a dream that lives; it is a gypsy
breathing in my soul; unconscious
sphere of thought within - a dream,
as some would say - but it is more
than that which lives: it lives and dies;
breathes beneath my breath; a sacrifice
particular to strange gods, ritual and its
own gold calves. The past - life given
us at birth - a dream from which none
walks away. Yet, we crave it in our bones:

those dreams from which one walks away
but
once.

Our freedom is to do its will; to change –
though with unchanging grace; to realize
in everyday there is the dream –
a Zionist within our genes; to never turn
aside from that from which one cannot
walk away. The dream. A sense of place,
a memory, a happenstance of lucky birth,
sixth sense, or call it déjà vu. No. No.

And No. You almost shout the thought –
There MUST be dreams from which one
cannot walk away.

(Not
one.)

And, child, one of them is you.