Two Horses

On a warm night in June

I went to the lake, got on all fours,

and drank like an animal. Two horses

came up beside me to drink as well.

This is amazing, I thought, but who will believe it?

The horses eyed me from time to time, snorting

and nodding. I felt the need to respond, so I snorted,

too, but haltingly, as though not really wanting to be heard.

The horses must have sensed that I was holding back.

They moved slightly away. Then I thought they might have known me

in another life the one in which I was a poet.

They might have even read my poems, for back then,

in that shadowy time when our eagerness knew no bounds,

we changed styles almost as often as there were days in the year.

The War Horse

This dry night, nothing unusual

About the clip, clop, casual

Iron of his shoes as he stamps death

Like a mint on the innocent coinage of earth.

I lift the window, watch the ambling feather

Of hock and fetlock, loosed from its daily tether

In the tinker camp on the Enniskerry Road,

Pass, his breath hissing, his snuffling head

Down. He is gone. No great harm is done.

Only a leaf of our laurel hedge is torn

Of distant interest like a maimed limb,

Only a rose which now will never climb

The stone of our house, expendable, a mere

Line of defence against him, a volunteer

You might say, only a crocus, its bulbous head

Blown from growth, one of the screamless dead.

But we, we are safe, our unformed fear

Of fierce commitment gone; why should we care

If a rose, a hedge, a crocus are uprooted

Like corpses, remote, crushed, mutilated?

He stumbles on like a rumour of war, huge

Threatening. Neighbours use the subterfuge

Of curtains. He stumbles down our short street

Thankfully passing us. I pause, wait,

Then to breathe relief lean on the sill

And for a second only my blood is still

With atavism. That rose he smashed frays

Ribboned across our hedge, recalling days

Of burned countryside, illicit braid:

A cause ruined before, a world betrayed.

Author: Eavan Boland

Riding a Nervous Horse

A dozen false starts:

You're such a fool, I said,

Spooking at shadows when

All day you were calm,

Placidly nosing the bushes

That now you pretend are strange,

Are struck with menace.

But he shuddered, stubborn

He feels like a wound spring ready to explode.

In his horsy posture,

Saying that I brought

Devils with me that he

Could hear gathering in all

The places behind him as I

Diverted his coherence

With my chatter and tack.

Indeed I have stolen

Something, a careful attention

I claim for my own yearning

Purpose, while he

Is left alone to guard

Us both from horse eaters

That merely grin at me

But I lust for him, for

The beauty of the haunch

My brush has polished, revealing

Treasures of edible light

In the shift of hide and hooves.

Author: Vicki Hearne

A CAT, A HORSE AND THE SUN

A cat mistrusts the sun

keeps out of its way

only where sun and shadow meet

it moves

a horse loves the sun

it basks all day

snorts

and beats its hooves

the sun likes horses

but hate cats

that is why it makes hay

and heats tin roofs

Ponies

Carved out of the darkness and far below

In the very last working, a stable

Where the pressure transforms into trees

Pit-props, rosettes into sunflowers,

Into grazing nosebags and the droppings

That smoulder among lumps of coal.

Like the fuzzy star her forelock covers,

A yarn about a townload somewhere

Two fields and no more, in one of them

The convergence of three counties, and her

Standing up to the gaskins in foxgloves,

Agrimony, swaying meadowsweet.

The Horse

 

The horse moves

independently

without reference 

to his load

He has eyes

like a woman and

turns them

about, throws

 back his ears

and is generally

conscious of

the world. Yet

he pulls when

he must and

pulls well, blowing

fog from

his nostrils

like fumes from

the twin

exhausts of a car.

William Carlos Williams

Love is Not

Love is not just a function of the eyes.

Beautiful objects will, of course, inspire

Possessive urges - you need not despise

Your taste. But when insatiable desire

Inflames you for a girl who's out of fashion,

Lacking in glamour - plain, in fact that fire

Is genuine; that's the authentic passion.

Beauty, though, any critic can admire.

Presenting myself

How Many Kisses

How many kisses satisfy,

How many are enough and more,

You ask me, Lesbia. I reply,

As many as the Libyan sands

Sprinkling the Cyrenaic shore

Where silphium grows, between the places

Where old King Battus’s tomb stands

And Jupiter Ammon has his shrine

In Siwa’s sweltering oasis;

As many as the stars above

That in the dead of midnight shine

Upon men’s secrecies of love.

When he has all those kisses, mad-

Hungry Catullus will have had

Enough to slake his appetite

So many that sharp eyes can’t tell

The number, and the tongues of spite

Are too confused to form a spell.