Elegy for Kentucky by Joy Priest

Elegy for Kentucky
Joy Priest

Nowhere to drive, night upon night
     that last summer, but back back

to the cokey couple I was crashing with
     in their 26-year habit. On the way there

the same horse always dying at the curve
     before I turned, like a kitschy disco ball,

onto their street, name I can’t recall.
     There she lay toppled like a toy figurine.

Calm but huffing, a laboring machine
     making steam, though the cold air

belonged to June, its grief. A filly
     done before becoming a mother, great belly

black & wide as all surrender
     & that magnificent face still against the grass

waiting on the end. There she was every time
     whispering something to me, a line

throbbing, a visible heartbeat I watched
     in the mirror for hours with my huge horse eyes.

I needed to see her, to make sure
     she was still there. I went the same way each evening

wanting to feel something, to see
     this once-immortal creature get up. Any weak thing

was welcome to finish me then & when he came
     into the room with bridle & bit,

on his 26-year high, when he came
     up on me where I was lying at that curve

in my mind, arms & teeth numb,
     I did not resist. Just a muted yell inside for months

before it lit on me like an ancestor.
     As a child, I followed my grandfather

across the street behind our house
     —Longfield Avenue, backside of the track

where the thoroughbreds for that May’s Derby
     were trapped, bored of what they were bred for,

all their royalty within a corral.
     My hand, a child’s offering, was empty

when they snorted & drew their worn noses
     across my palm, yet, it was in their nature to remain

friendly toward me. My home did not keep
     its promise after my grandfather died.

There was no protection for what I was
     without him. Lone black filly. Finished

before becoming. She must have tired
     of standing there high-headed, waiting for me

to ride her out of that war, to call out
     let’s go. We are done here.

SELECTED BY TYREE DAYE

In a Virtual Craft Talk hosted by Vermont Studio Center Priest discusses the use of what is referred to as the “transpositional phenomena of the line,” which Priest defines as “where two or more clauses or half lines meet on the same line and are distinguished from each other by punctuation, the punctuation acts as a threshold over which the two clauses can be transposed literally flipped in read opposite as syntactically conjoined and or as juxtaposed to create emphasis on an idea or to draw out the conceit”. The “transpositional phenomena of the line” becomes the vehicle in which Priest’s imagination is used to give “new meaning to the vessel itself.”

The vessel is the place itself, the horse, and the speaker’s body. The line “Nowhere to drive, night upon night,” is again transpositional, which of course breaks on “night,” but the sentence does not end until the word habit; Nowhere to drive, night upon night that last summer, but back back to the cokey couple I was crashing with in their 26-year habit (period). The line shows a speaker circling a street, in which the name is not recalled, and because we are circling the street, we are also circling the horse.

I would also suggest lines such as “Any weak thing was welcome to finish me then,” possibly circling themselves as we do, trying to find a place within. Circling to find something new becomes the horse “dying at the curve.” Or something outside of ourselves as a representation of how we feel. Then we are shown the circling in the lines “On the way there the same horse always dying at the curve before I turned, like a kitschy disco ball, onto their street.”

ABOUT TYREE DAYE

Tyree Daye was raised in Youngsville, North Carolina. He is the author of the poetry collections a little bump in the earth (Copper Canyon Press), Cardinal (Copper Canyon Press), and River Hymns (American Poetry Review), winner of the APR/Honickman First Book Prize. A Cave Canem fellow and a Palm Beach Poetry Festival Langston Hughes Fellow, Daye is the recipient of a Whiting Writers Award, a Kate Tufts Award finalist, and a 2021 Paterson Prize finalist. He was the 2019 Diana and Simon Raab Writer-In-Residence at the University of California, Santa Barbara, and received an Amy Clampitt Residency.