And the Time Is: Poems, 1958-2013

The Song of the Horse

91 The Song of the Horse My father said, “All horses when they run are beautiful.” I think of that each time I watch Arabians in silhouette, the clobbering drays, the jet stallions that policemen rein, the stilting foals and colts, the sometimes bumping always pumping rumps of geldings harnessed to a rig. They prance through war and history: “Without a horse the Mongols never could have conquered Europe.” And tragedy: “A horse, a horse, my kingdom for a horse!” And sport: “Five minutes of hard polo will exhaust the strongest horse on earth.” Unsaddled and afoot, how far could Cossack, cowboy, Indian, and cavalier have gone? What made so many generals and emperors prefer their portraiture on horseback? What simulacrum but a horse succeeded where Achilles failed? And where did John put hatred, famine, pestilence, and war but on the backs of horses? And that’s not all. Pegasus still says to gravity that poetry’s none other than a horse with wings. 92 It’s not a question of intelligence. Horses, like poetry, are not intelligent—just perfect in a way that baffles conquest, drama, polo, plow, and shoe. So poem-perfect that a single fracture means a long, slow dying in the hills or, if man’s around, the merciful aim an inch below the ear. But when they run, they make the charge of any boar at bay, the prowl of all the jungle cats, the tracking beagle, or the antelope in panic seem ignoble. Just for the sake of the running, the running, the running they run . . . And not another animal on two or four or forty legs can match that quivering of cords beneath their pelts, the fury in their manes, the hooves that thump like rapid mallets on the earth’s mute drum, the exultation of the canter and the gallop and the rollick and frolic and the jump. ...