Our Shakespearean Heaven
Robert Wood Lynn | Poetry
For the amount of time horses spend in introspection
you’d think they’d make better art. Not that I haven’t
seen a few uncannily abstract expressionist hoofprints
or some like the letter C printed on top of itself offset
enough to suggest one of them is the other’s shadow—
though in this black ink who’s to tell which from which?
CCCCCCCCC
CCCCCCCCCC
It looked like . You’d think for all this time
horses spend in introspection they’d be better writers
or writers at all but it turns out the one horse they taught
to do math would just count upwards until he felt you
feel him arrive at the right answer. Somewhere, he’s still
at it, our softest scientist, counting upwards, tallying
the monkeys needed to type the entirety of Hamlet.
You’d think I’d know better but I fell in love once
with an art historian insurance appraiser who taught me
the third best way to make a painting worth something
is to put a horse in it—that’s if you can’t manage a ship
or a dog. I thought then of this poem, which has all three,
shining so expensive together in the previous sentence
though no one had yet bothered to write it. I had a horse
that tried, I think you know already how that turned out.
Robert Wood Lynn is a poet from Virginia. His debut collection Mothman Apologia (2022 Yale University Press) was the winner of the Yale Younger Poets prize and Kate Tufts Discovery Award. His work has been featured in American Poetry Review, The Atlantic, The Nation, Poetry Magazine and other publications. He teaches poetry at Juilliard.