Hollis Kurman
A.S. Williams’s The Palliative Horse: A Journey of Hope
One of my most bittersweet childhood memories is from the theater. Our mother took us to see the play Our Town by Thornton Wilder, structured into three acts: ‘Daily Life’, ‘Love and Marriage’, and ‘Death’. In the play’s famous final scene, the newly deceased character Emily is granted permission to rejoin Earth and the sweet ordinariness of daily life–for just one day. When Emily blurted out the iconic line (borrowed from poet Edna St. Vincent Millay), ‘O, World, I cannot hold You close enough!’, I thought my young heart would explode right there in my theatre seat. ‘Yes!’, I thought, ‘all this beauty and goodness hiding everywhere, if only we would look closer while we still can.’ I decided on the spot that I would pay more attention, bear witness, and love harder. Stop taking it all for granted. This may be one of the most valuable things poetry can help us do, as the poet A.S. Williams demonstrates in her gorgeous new book The Palliative Horse: A Journey of Hope.
The poems and flash fiction in this short collection take the reader on a journey of battling and accepting illness, reminiscence and reflection, fury and appreciation – taking nothing for granted along the way. In plain, but evocative language, Williams’s writing offers an embrace but also the kind of aching wake-up call Wilder was getting at in Our Town. As she concludes in her poem ‘If Wishes Were Faeries’, ‘Sucking up to their whimsical ways so they may grant me/ just a/ little/ more/ time.’
Throughout the book, Williams calls on faeries, fairy tales, and character-speak to great effect. Has anyone said it better than ‘Wolf in a White Coat’? Williams captures the recognizable jumble of dread, hope, and helplessness of a patient waiting for a doctor’s news that may seal their fate:
Her white coat luminescent
in the moonlight.
Hearing my footsteps she stands and bars
my way, but doesn’t dare
meet my eyes. Anger rises in me sharp
and vociferous as a pike’s
bite. I want to cup her chin and
scream, look at me. Smile as if you have good news.
But no, she just takes another
pebble and skims it over the water.
In the poem ‘Put ‘em up! Put ‘em up!’, she conjures the courage and ‘deluded’ forward momentum of The Cowardly Lion from The Wizard of Oz. Only, in this case, it’s not a yellow brick road that moves her along but a ‘butter-yellow/ dress. Triumphant/ its sunny banner says, yay/ I beat the nay-sayers.’ Yellow, in a Christmas scarf or ‘knobby cascades’, eggs and daffodils, peeks through the verses as a subtle but cheerful dare, like ‘sunshine an insult to my grief’. She also draws bits of bravery from memories of a stronger time, a time before there were ‘red blood counts’ or ‘rising tumor levels’ to contend with, like the revenge ride in bumper cars with her bullied son: ‘Our bones jangle like ghost-train skeletons./ We aim for the jeering kids. Head on.’
Nothing evokes memories as poignantly as familiar smells from the past, and Williams sprinkles them generously throughout the book. The scent of farmland and its fresh mown hay, kitchen baking and Sunday roasts, seaside salt and the sticky sweetness of fairground treats, strung together here like an olfactory soundtrack of the poet’s life and an ode to the world she would like to hold close while preparing for the end.
In ‘The Murmuration’ and other poems, Williams exposes the naked truths of humanity at its most vulnerable moments:
Inside the whale-belly building
I am just a clump of cells.
A bar code announces my
presence, grants me an audience
with mercurial gods.
Even in verse, pain comes in waves: ‘I bawl out my humanity in a side room…The cathedral spits me out into fading/ daylight.’ Yet these poems warn against the othering of the ill, be it in condescension, awkwardness, or awe. In ‘They Mean Well,’ Williams reminds well-wishers, ‘I am not more special than I was.’ And to see the person, not the patient. Instead of a careful How are you? or ‘tip-toey polite’, ‘Ask me about/ a poem I wrote, when I galloped/ across a hillside, lay among bluebells,/ shared an ice-cream with my dog…’
As they do in our lives, animals play a central role in these poems. The dog and the truth of her unbridled joy. The memory of a newborn lamb in the snow who didn’t make it despite loving care. And the incongruous, healing presence of the Palliative Horse from the book’s title: ‘We inhale each other’s breath, watch the sun fall, both thankful to be here, alive.’ Who is healing whom feels almost irrelevant in these poems, as the connection between human and animal brings out the best in both.
The later poems in the book wrestle with acquiescence. In the brilliantly titled ‘Death Came in an Uber’, the narrator takes a little trip down Memory Lane with Death in a stuffy Uber fitted with faux leather seats. After a bumpy start and wrangling for control, ‘The tension between Death and me lessens. He offers me a boiled sweet and I accept.’ Ultimately, as lovingly ‘remembered hills’ come into view, they make their peace: ‘I open the window wider. Death reaches back his hand and I grasp it in gratitude. The scent of fresh mown hay and the sound of the skylark tell me, finally, I am heading home.’ The poet indicates that this ‘Death Came in an Uber’ is after Emily Dickinson’s ‘Because I could not stop for Death’. But it also hints at the pointed wistfulness of Dickens’ A Christmas Carol.
Finally, in clear, clean, tight verses, the poem ‘Afterwards’ challenges us to imagine those we will leave behind once we’re gone: ‘How will it be when/ there’s no one on the shoreline/ to wave back?’ and ‘The sun will shine through/ empty contours/ where I used to stand.’ Nothing saccharine here, but I was left with a lump in my throat, nonetheless. O World, indeed.
I’d like to re-read and re-visit many of these poems, some of which made me close the book and close my eyes after reading them to allow their full impact to hit me. Williams’ writing will be a gift to many as she gives voice to the un-voice-able. This is a book to share. AQ