Near & Far” comes out of a larger body of work concerned with labor and precarity, desire and commerce—about trying to make money and fall in love. I was always stuck in dead-end manual labor jobs, learning object lessons. The central image in the poem arrives from a horse barn, where I was taught how to lead a horse safely to pasture without letting it break away. That instruction stayed with me as a lesson about proximity and control, and about the risks involved in holding another being’s desire too closely. The poem builds from that experience outward, moving from a lesson into a field of memory and sensation.•
I was cloistered like an anchorite
dreaming of hazelnuts &
salmon colored clouds
I drank perfume listened to AM radio
& when I closed my eyes
I saw the horse’s tapered ankles
in their Valhalla fields that summer
beside setting up my fake email account
I worked at a horsebarn
a true misadventure they said
they needed a stablehand
& the first rule I learned was
in leading a horse to pasture
to keep their gaze steady
and focused not to
let them seek the richer
greener grass they would
be tempted to eat as it was
better than their usual feed
the man training me spoke sternly
if they go for the grass
dipping their long impossibly
heavy steaming smooth head and
you’re holding on to their reins
they will tear your arm
out of the socket & thus
I learned the danger of holding on to
another’s desire in your arms
my other task that summer
was to stand on a ladder and paint
the whole horsebarn black•
This poem appears in Issue 36 of Alta Journal.
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Jake Rose is the author of JOAN, which won the Phoenix Emerging Poet Book Prize in 2026. They teach at UC Davis and coedit the literary magazine Vers. They live in Northern California.
