WHAT HORSES MEAN

How fleet, how difficult to spear.

Bewitch their shapes in red clay on cave walls.

How they uplift a man above his neighbor.

Carry him to commerce or to war.

How they can be tamed with whip or whisper.

How they learn to stand quietly and wait.

How incorrigible, they sunfish or rear

Over backwards, how they won’t relent.

How they stampede, heedless into traffic

Or jog through city streets bearing a child.

How they will race, impelled to be the first

Though their cannon bones shatter, their hearts break.

How grazing in pastures, they focus a landscape

So the eye blesses them with attention.

How early artists saw them extended

As birds in flight, beautiful but wrong

How the camera at last defined the action

Of their legs at the gallop.

How their names emboldened myth

Pegasus, Bucephalus, Pale Horse of the Apocalypse.

How they depend upon the herd, fly from danger

Sleep standing like sentries, always alert.

How they allow the iron in their mouths,

The saddle, the spur, collect their motion.

How they kowtow or struggle

Or with dignity display their elevated gaits.

How their statued posture reveals the nature

Of the deaths of commanders.

How they define the nature

Of force in their supplanters.

Portland Review