This poem appears along with two others from my work-in-progress Welcome to All the Pleasures over at the Oxonian Review. Click here to visit. While there, have a look around at some of the excellent criticism and essays on offer.

White Horse

mons albi equi – an Abingdon cartulary, 1072-1084 (?)

 

I start across the rumbling avenue
And nearly miss it again. Between
Trolley tracks, nestled in new concrete,
It strides in place: The white horse,
Liquid in its stillness. Its mane trails gently
Like jellyfish in an ocean current,
Legs like thin streams, tail fanned to a delta.

I feel back to another gray day,
A hill near Oxford, and there in the Vale
Is the chalk horse, a simpler form than this
But kin, scratched white into the hard green:
Equine specter escaping over the scarp.

Someone must tend it, I’m told,
Or it would be consumed in a year by grass.
Nations wear away while it stays—with help
From those who return age after age
Perhaps from simple habit, not knowing why.
I think of caves where horse is mere glyph,
Smeared onto stone with charcoal and spit,
A creature forever untamable,
Always aimed urgently away from us
And what we dare to hope will remain.

Then I’m back. Rain starts
Again. The outline sketched here is
So light it almost eludes us.
Who put it here and why? A horn blasts
Me from a trance. I step to safety.
A trolley rumbles and clanks forward
Casting the horse beneath it into shadow.