Sometimes in India
the plow pulls up old terra cotta horses.
The farmer says they are gifts from God.
The grandmothers say
they are the souls of ancestors.
And the foreigner--
he says they are just old terra-cotta horses.

Somewhere on a farm in Ohio
is a girl who hooks rugs.
She is my great-grandmother,
but she doesn't know that yet.
She has a horse named Jack
who is her best friend.
I had one too,
later on,
but his name was Little Red
because he was red like the paint
of my ten-speed bike.
I shot the girl's shotgun once
in my dad's arms,
and it kicked back and bruised my shoulder.
And Dad said,
"She wouldn't have cried like that,
she was tough, her and old Jack."
And for a moment I could hear the pounding of hooves
as she rode through the forests with her brothers,
unbraided hair flowing behind her,
tasting summer in the wind.
But that was long before her eyes stopped searching
for fallen hooking needles
and names of faces and horses long buried.

The potter of horses
hums over his wooden wheel
and makes the farmer's clay
into legs, neck and tail.
And he joins them together
in fourteen days and the heat of the sun.
Then the farmer takes it home by shoulder
to prepare for thanks--
for the health of his wife and child,
or his crops that didn't dry up,
or other things
a farmer might be thankful for.

In India the women paint their prayers.
They paint with water and rice paste
and fingers that drip on clay
and dry white in the hot morning sun.
Sometimes they paint the ground
in front of the house.
Sometimes they paint
their walls of melted dung.

Each day,
the women paint their homes
before the sun does,
every day a new design,
a new prayer for God to see.
By noon the monsoon rains
or their children's feet
will have washed them all away.

In another time,
the grandmother-girl
painted with scraps of colored wool
on a burlap sack
with a hooking-needle
that dropped from her tired fingers
every minute or so.
The needle made prayers into rug-pictures
that told of stories and dreams
of a girl long ago.
Always in the picture is her Jack:
sometimes in front of a carriage
in London or Central Park,
Sometimes a smeared brown speck
in a field of distant snow.
But always there is Jack,
and always far from a farm in Ohio.
Later,
this grandmother spread her prayers
to soften the floors for my baby hands and knees.
But I don't remember this,
or the faded colors of girlhood memories
waiting there under the dust of trodden feet.

In Indian homes,
the grandmother paints prayers
on the horse
with words I don't understand.
Saffron, red, white.
Then the farmer gives the horse
to his god in the roadside shrine.
He sets it there
and pats it on the head one last time.
After sunset,
they say that the spirit of the clay turns real in the night
and runs to join the army of God's horses
that circle the sky like stars.
And God stands in the center of thuderous hooves
and does not think about clay in roadside shrines
that will tomorrow be thrown
to the banyan tree ouside
on a pile of empty horses
five feet high.