Boundaries We take our shovelsfull of horse manure behind the barn and pile it up toward a sirus clouded, early-morning sky. Once done, the barn clean, I sit upon a stall-post above a twelve hand mare as Jim begins to curry coal-black hair, his body small against the hugeness of the jumper horse. It doesn't seem as if he has the room to breathe inside the small, close, dirty white, manure stained, pungent odored stall. "You seem to think that art must always grow," I say, continuing a conversation old with argument and thought and counter-thought. "Horizons burn forever in the human psyche's skull." His sculptor's hands sweep back and forth across the horse's flanks, his body-rhythm calm. "Unlike my peers, I've held tradition close all through my life," he says. "My sculpture stands upon its pedestal as recognizable and filled with muscles, blood, and bone as any work by Michelangelo, da Vinci, or Rodin. But still, I've smoothed out lines and strengthened mass to reach some resolution that can add a new twist to the way we look at ourselves." "Yet, those traditions that you've held so close enclose you with their boundaries," I say. "They don't allow the world to slice apart into a lump of clay. They don't imprison sight into chaotic sweeps of clean design, or let a search for words emoting power become the only reason justifying thought." "You've said too many don'ts," he says. "The best in art is affirmation, singing to the new and fresh that's always in the human spirit." The barn is steaming horse breath at the spring. Black, ancient harnesses hang on the walls beside the English saddles brown from use. Jim finishes the mare and leads her out into the brightness of the morning air. The mare stands still, then gallops off toward the wooden troughs beside the A-frame house. Jim saunters back into the barn's half light, a shining shadow darkened into man. "I don't like Wordsworth much," I say. "He mucks his way through poetry too much instead of piercing down into his subject's bone. But in one perfect sonnet, "Nuns Fret Not At Their Convent's Narrow Room", he says, In truth, the prison, into which we doom ourselves, no prison is, and hints that freedom can swell inside a narrow, confined space. I'm not so sure that art should be organic as if it is a tree or plant or forest floor. I sometimes think that art can best fulfill its purposes if it's confined by rules that make the artist sweat and squirm and strive to build his freedom inside prison walls. I'm not completely sure I'm right, of course. But still, it seems as if art's gone too far toward a visionary creativity that's empty of the substance which has made art man's reaction to the life he leads." "You don't like transcendental art," he says. I look around me at the dusky barn, the harnesses and saddles, Jim Gehr, small against the corrogated metal walls: The stallion, mare, and colt still in their stalls, the straw and hay bales, pitchforks, rusty tools. I smell the steaming horse-strong, hay-sweet smells and feel the spring rise through the wooden floor from thawing ground into the barn-close space. "This life's enough for poetry," I say. "There's miracles enough in common talk to bring alive an awe of human life. I don't see why we artists have to reach beyond ourselves, our lives, emotions, thoughts to find a meaning hidden in design, or power throttled full by flaming words describing suicide at Plath's "Egg Rock". I want an art of life, an art that looks at life with meaning, hope, emotion, thought." Jim smiles. "You'd throw out Guernica and Miro's canvas doodling and all the playfulness and joy in Calder's huge, bright mobiles swirling in the sun," he says. I try to look into his eyes from where I perch upon the horse stall's wooden post. The barn's soft light is too diffuse, too dim. I feel alone upon my perch, alone and lost. "I don't mean that," I say. "Contemporary art has moments. Roethke's Far Field poems touch life as sure as any masterpiece by Frost. But art still needs its boundaries in place. Imagination, pure design, a Pollock work have every right to be just what they are. A bear cub wrestling with a salmon's tail still has its place, still has its meaning straight inside a world chaotic, crazy, ill-formed, mad." He purses out his lower lip and shrugs. "You're right and wrong," he says. "We artists fit the molds we cast around our anxious selves." Before my thoughts begin to form again he takes a curry comb off of the wall and tosses it toward my tall, great perch. "You've made me talk so long the chores have slid," he says. "You'll have to pay for all your talk." I look across the empty stall below my dangling feet and wonder at the stallion's size. Its stall contains so much of restless horse I wonder if a poet could be crushed while working in a four-walled space so small.