The Wild Horses

The horses imagined by a boy
Who cannot get himself to sleep
Are grazing so deep within a story
He cannot say what it means to keep
Such things inside and at a distance;
They are a silent governance
He feels but cannot name.
The horses change, and are the same.
They run miles farther than the meadows
In which he sees them run. They have no shadows,
Are unceasing, and they never die.
What he feels when watching them is like a cry
Heard somewhere else, and neither pain
Nor happiness in it, but sustained
Like a long note played in an empty room.
And that is how he waits for sleep, which soon
Takes him deeper than the fastest animal
As he tunnels clockwise in a fall,
The meadows rising through him, then gone
Somewhere above, until alone
He sees the horses turn in one long curve
That rounds them back where nothing moves,
And he knows that they were always blind,
Running from what they heard each time
The wind would shift, running away
Because they could not see their way.

To him, the horses are beautiful and sad;
They are a celebration made
Out of the way they end, begin again,
A morning’s bright imperative sustained
Long after dark. They are a walling out
By looking in, what opens when he shuts
His eyes, the body’s quiet allegory
By which it knows itself, a story
Told against the body that it cannot see.
The horses run because they’re free
And incomplete, while poised somewhere between
The half-light in the hall and what he’s seen
Inside, the boy wakes or sleeps, or turns against
His sleep, naming a larger self that rests
Invisibly, yet in sight of what it sees,
Rests without feeling, in the calculated ease
Of someone small, afraid, and fragile,
Alone and looking out, flexed but agile.