The Horse Show by William Carlos Williams

My mother is in the hospital today recovering from knee surgery.  However, she suffers from some mild dementia and is having a very hard time understanding why she has to be in the hospital and why she can't come home.  When I first read this poem, I thought it was about Flossie, WCW's long suffering wife, but, of course, on re-reading I understand now that he is talking about a conversation with his mother and she is confined to home or hospital. The poem  is in the form of those conversations about nothing . . . . and everything  . . . that characterize hospital discussions.  We try to act like there is nothing unusual about one person being in a bed and surrounded by family, catered to by strangers.  And it is unusual to actually talk to someone without them doing something else - watching TV or preparing a meal. . . just to talk.  About what? I think those hospital conversations share something with poetry as well. While consciously mundane and ordinary, they have hidden in them the kernels of  much more profound and serious matters . . . matters of life and death.


The Horse Show


Constantly near you, I never in my entire
sixty-four years knew you so well as yesterday
or half so well.  We talked.  You were never
so lucid, so disengaged from all exigencies
of place and time.  We talked of ourselves,
intimately, a thing never heard of between us.
How long have we waited? almost a hundred years.


You said, Unless there is some spark, some
spirit we keep within ourselves, life, a
continuing life's impossible-and it is all
we have.  There is no other life, only the one.
The world of the spirits that comes afterward
is the same as our own, just like you sitting
there they come and talk to me, just the same.


They come to bother us.  Why? I said.  I don't 
know.  Perhaps to find out what we are doing.
Jealous, do you think?  I don't know.  I 
don't know why they should want to come back.
I was reading about some men who had been
buried under a mountain, I said to her, and
one of them come back after two months,


digging himself out.  It was in Switzerland,
you remember?  Of course I remember.  The
villagers tho't it was a ghost coming down
to complain.   They were frightened.  They
do come, she said, what you call
my "visions."  I talk to them just as I
am talking to you.  I see them plainly.


Oh if I could only read!  You don't know
what adjustments I have made.  All
I can do is to try to live over again
what I knew when your brother and you
were children- but I can't always succeed.
Tell me about the horse show.  I have 
been waiting all week to hear about it.


Mother darling, I wasn't able to get away.
Oh that's too bad.  It was just a show;
they make the horses walk up and down
to judge them by their form.  Oh is that
all? I tho't it was something else. Oh
they jump and run too.  I wish you had been
there, I was so interested to hear about it.