John Peck

Night deepening, frost leans on the stables of thoroughbreds, west wind splitting their hooves. —LI HO, “Twenty-three Poems about Horses” Steed out of my dusk and a dusk, now, for the species, veins deltawise down your silky inner thigh, veins trickling from one eye down the roan cliffside of a nose vaulted and chanceled for winds of the Pleistocene, you have come, you paw patiently, that is the main thing, the fields between stretch wider and we, the restless, are everywhere save where your nostril quivers, arches, and you snort in the night. We who debouch into all places dream of you now nowhere. You come to a woman’s hand: that smile. You come to a child’s hand, giggling and shivers. Your hot breath pleasures soldiers. Harnessed to caisson with bannered coffin, to the barouche at a state wedding, you are ambassador from the eldest kingdom. The King of Brazil sent a forest of teak to pave the streets girdling the Pantheon, to muffle the clatter you hauled there. When we spurred you against Wellington’s infantry squares, you side-ran them or reared back. The god of catasrophes took note. Sad banner you were in the prophecies of Sweet Medicine, the whiskered whitneys bringing and spawning your manes and tails among the Arapaho, Cheyenne, Lakota, Kiowa, your speed between their loins a drumming into decline. Under Tutankhamun, the generalissimo who rode you hummed his tenth title: Overseer of Works in the Hill of Gritstone, while there in those Works among the pulling men pulled also your brother, sent down because of a freakish temperament. Muir knew you on both shores, and van der Post knew you, mufti lords recognizing a lord in service. Nuzzle them both. They say that Poseidon at Onchestos, breaking you as a colt, had your driver leap off where the road entered forest, and watched to see what you’d do, the rig rattling--smash it against the trunks on the run, or walk it through tall shadows. Where you linger for shade on the veldt, branches level, a tree is the only tree. Your water, the only water. Flickers of hair along your neck’s crest release the only signal. Which staggers from storm cloud to browse oats. Stubby melted candle, your recessed phallus makes no howitzer but glistens a coat whose sheen ripples off. For I imagine that Li Ho, seeing good men misused as you were, foresaw your withdrawal from our night grasses. For your standing here re-ordains neither Akhilleus nor Cuchulain. Dew braids your mane with fresh constellations. For what shall we make of you, made into goddess, mare sacrificed but receiving cult also among the footloose on the steppes: mother ridden by god-spear, great mam thus captured, cinched, spurred? though your flanks shudder unfettered. Through mists we flash bits of mirror, but from them you pound abreast, neither parent, eyes orbing the two sides. For that demigod’s eye, tiding, capsizes anyone who would turn trainer. And this one goes on into the bond. A trainer aims at one thing, but what tingles him is force hinting at the uncontainable, the opponent. And the top tamers, spook-soothers, the whisperers, will write their books but miss the appointment. It is not inscribed. The two grooms beside you in Hokusai’s whitewater cascade lave you with splashes of it, currying your bulk, hoisting your nosebag--and no one has set the timer, everywhere it is one sound, stampede steadied and rocking in it. Your great-grandparents, unicorn wild asses from Persia and Scythia, fostered childbirth but also pissed plagues, the unharnessable summum totium browsing in ocean, an eye-spangled three-legged mountain. Hell and cloud in your seed! It was your miniature stature at the beginning, Maria Tallchief at ten, that wedged you between giants into the straightaway. And the reindeer modeled from smudge in the Font de Gaume grotto at Les Eyzies, fading across your body, trails a third antler like a skater’s scarf through your head, broadening out, a dancer’s arm rippling after the total gather. Looking back from the pass at his mounted escorts, flashing them three turns back down the corkscrew, the Fourteenth Dalai Lama saw them slumped on your back, the red of Rahu in splashes and trickling stillness. And dripping you still awaited their nudges. In that patience, the kernel of the twister moan-lifting over Kansas, the shrapnel clatter of your take-off. Across that aftermath, bubbling through wind-sound or the mind’s rise from its cringe, the flubber-flutter of moody-moodlessness. So the unforeseen from you opposes the blindly seen in us-- your fuse as a spurter, jump-taker, yet a curb also to our unsnaffled berserkness. For the berserking Greek says that only that ass’s horn or hoof, cut off and cupped upward, can hold any of the cold torrent under the world, implacable Styx, All else, graces or muons, it crumbles. And every jot which that flow dissolves, the images with their assessors, has rolled in us. And you have stood calmly beside us, your shot breath a bloom in the cold, your hooves hammers yet also the last and only chalice. The unreached-for cup, beaker for world-toxin, breast englobing ground zero. And so we know you not. And I realize: though I have walked drenched in spring rains my bare thighs have not hugged your warm bellows in a downpour. For though your manic tribe is mine, the boreal chargers, mere rooms, a migrant’s mangy stations, have detained me. For while historians of cultures hot on the spoor of roots among their root clans have heard you drum past, they looked up only briefly. For though engravers assumed you would stay, given their way with your musculature, accoutrements, wavy harness, tip-toe grooms, gear draped over your cruppers like an evening gown, its ratios and metalwork continuous with Genghis Khan’s and a jockey’s, their inky mastery frames cosily misleading questions: which posthouse this evening, what pasture tomorrow? Whereas you inquire into rupture and the unfenced: what thunder between flesh and ground, what surge from the cells even past sundown?

* If sound, then why not the full reach of mind, and if that cantilever then why not the whole keyboard with its totality of partials? But then one meets the dragon, pipes up a bright disciple,whose two dramas, lieber Meister, are suicide and the founding of the state. My name is a household word

The column of the commander yielded to our first sweep. Even the water jar for our diggers we set on the south wall of the general’s tomb without knowing it. So we began. His armies retook Nubia, Libya, and the Levant, lost under the sway-bellied lantern-jawed Sun King. Overseer of all scribes, Overseer of the priests of Horus, Grain-giver to all lands, Royal chief of staff, Regent, the general had himself carried on his palanquin through the wailing processions to oversee the work on this place. And so carved, thus: one of his men punches a Nubian in the face. The general was low-born; everything had counted and he knew what counted most. His platoons lift open palms towards Tutankhamun. The general towers as a sway-girdled go-between at court for beseeching Libyans. Only the pearl-handled revolvers do not figure here, or the comeback challenge Nuts! in the Ardennes winter forest. He had himself carried beyond the busy streets of the dead in the city of the dead sloping back from the bluff to a higher, private terrace looking across to Memphis. But then he rose to Pharaoh. So he is not here. Instead his first wife lay here, and then his queen also. At his own royal tomb in the Valley, where the designs remained uncarved, sketching idea along stone, he does not rest either. The fine picklock hand got past Anubis and the reared serpents, and got to him, the Lord of Upper and Lower Egypt. It got past Truth with her high feather, which moved at the slightest disturbance. The general did deep obeisance to her. He is not here. What at last moves the heart? So much already moved, even in his own century, architects prying loose mud bricks of the core for new tombs. Cult funded in perpetuity gone in two generations. So Coleridge, who was indisposed that day, prudently remained in the circle of lime trees while his friends went off on their walk through the countryside. He followed them in his mind. That way no one would have to dismantle Horeheb’s outer court to secure bricks for the statuary room, and facing stones. He cast his mind outward, a net over his dear ones, sending them at pace through the middle distance of steeples, hill lines, and the murder of Lamb’s mother by his sister, a brief madness, thus through the appropriately middle distance where such things are built and performed in fact, no closer, no farther, then on out to the cleansing rim of apocalypse, evening in the bath of waning fire, one bird stitching the whole veil of showings tight along its upper hem— though he was not there, he could tell them that none the less he was next to his words and his word was with them, even unto the rim of their wandering and their turning back. One dome of air and fire. But he was not there. Nor I here. What removes the heart from what moves it? As if I were the lecturer before a congress of doctors, his clinching point approaching, when suddenly he stared out in silence, and at last said, Ladies and gentlemen, esteemed colleagues, the only thing I can see at this moment inside my brain, such as it is, is a little white mouse chasing a little white ball.

An apple paring curled from the knife wetly down my thumb— and what I had failed to do rightly touching that life next to mine, wearing late afternoon’s numb luminosity, impaled me. A hunter knee-deep in salt marsh, whom Anton Chekov might have set there and then left, back to doctoring, or choked off as too dark, wanton, met the steep flailing of teal, trailed their shrill lift, but stood only, hearing them. Pouring the last tea of an evening, dark amber alive, breathing in quintessence of India, I felt limber bark sheathing the shrub of my life’s tree with root good, but dense, dark, local, raw there, and so in dark woke, the seeing doctor, two simple profiles of linked characters in his air, cruel, good, a pair ample, true across that split yoke, true to its splayed force— simple so rare, though.

People expected that the evil would finally drain away. —Aleksander Wat, My Century Faded and baked here to a tawny grit, spills of blood and seed from humanity called from it for its crimes against mute earth gully in footpaths, dribble down to the sea, payment now and forever drawn from birth through flesh’s sunny darkness. Light yeasts in it. And if I find the slope to crumbled temples of that light’s god dragging at me through heat, shallow degrees of slant up to remnant stone, then something more than burnt air, or the repeat of weight known as time, pulls heavily in this zone, something the bone brings, terrible through simple. Phoibos, slayer at distances with shock, sower of plague and arrower of healing, tension of bright-dark beyond spanning, love will not quite cast out evil while revealing your fissionables. The raven was your dove. Heavy isotopes hum with crickets in rock. Neither woman nor man, my driver laughed when his lights torched writhings down the far shoulder, cross-dresser in the night beyond Naples, huge, sinuous, crooning as we shot past. Life seems older in its variant forms, drawn by the centrifuge to the rim and swinging, swayed in time’s dream uncalfed. For the vast thrower, shafter of quivering force, sex was filigree in whoever served. Pythoness, yes, wombed keeper of those coils in the wet cellar where tongue darted and swerved. But her own throat when it swelled with voice knew toils past a man’s strength, torqued bulging from the source. And that young man fitted with bone and thong and membrane from his withers by his father the maze molder, when he climbed into flame itself in the high nucleus, dripped as slather down the sky’s maw. Union there, with an aim at the center, crisped on a central soundless gong, sizzling from his overreach extended back on itself and down, the soundless hurry of the sea far below minutely riven, trembling in place, diamonds in blue slurry nowhere disturbed yet flecking everywhere, driven— all this boy’s cry endlessly thin, suspended. The sybil when at last her throat disgorged its burdens rumbled like a pawing bull, or the bull-fiend on Krete, and shrilly warbled. Birds ride the bull’s hump in stone graphs, that full barbarity at poise piercing now the garbled clang of Ikaros, over us tensile and forged. This is the crumbling whistle of shells and frags in their close arc. Philosophy gets precise when it turns practical. This in our background whir. Archimedes, old Fermi in your eyes, naked, ecstatic with theorems that assure conclusion, your city falls, your hacked flesh sags. There was a sprig which, if you bore it in hand on landing here, your pilot drowned and your herald crushed in the surf, would bend and seem to listen— there was a branch that trailed her voice through imperiled corridors to throats of the dead, and glistened, then brought you back to your breath near shining sand. And there was pelt from the solar scavenger, its blond mane tossing with your workings, turning catastrophe to triumph, lion crud strewn now on waves, coat of the charger burning obsidian cobalt platinum and mud in craters of the shaker and avenger. Eroded skull of this squat promontory, nubbled shrine over cave by surf hypnotized before deeps enameled with fire’s mosaic, you are the structure lucid though pulverized behind the logics, and the omens prosaic in their spelling out, and the blaze of story. Give me your light! I am the darkened thing seeking it. Give me your fire and your cry! But hood me from sulfurs she inhaled when she twisted over the fissure, give me your hand from the sky we have fallen into. Give, yes, what you insisted she utter, rasped uncoilings of your spring! And then release me to the animal shy of speech yet steady in ecstasies, your cousin the outsider’s gaze through life, the drink of it down, and finally mind as frieze eternally in metamorphic strife released, sea stone and cloud infinitely small. And there the migrant and his wanderers may find the new land, and their future wars may roll, exhausted in hissing foam, to sink over the fish spines, and the blunderers of fulfillment stare at samsaric wink of ocean, stare and find sleep that dissolves the curse.

At a bus stop in Arles a fellow wounded in the Last War winced into sunlight:Oui, they are beating the drums against les juifs again, and the Moors. France is an old man!

I rubbed wax crayon against blowing paper. From the rock face footed a dancer white through red. My family gave me over to it, gone for the river. Were I a peasant harvesting grapes near Beaune in the last century, even, I might have dreamed a saint lifting off for Arles, Les Saintes Maries de la Mer, and knowing about cannon in that long peace, might have been troubled therefore that my flier hauled a magnum of the best and bloodied the west sky with it and vanished. My fisting that loose sheet in place was secretarial, not visionary! Already in that decade small tribes entered the void like windows on a skyscraper when the bent janitor makes his way. But those flick back on each night, costly difference. It is not only portents in dream or flapping images of the gone or the soon-to-be-going or the tremblingly poised that catch like undertow the foot in tide-rip toeing down the singing or remembered beach. We study populations in the forests, we hold the paper flat, mark, note, warn—the dictated prophecies do their work, we do some work— cut horn from rhinos so they won’t be poached. But, to go on from there, one needs to stand in the doorway some evening and feel the air as if it were fire pulling illusionlessly, letting the draw of one fact heat its chain of links, such as, Japan clear-cutting forests in Siberia where tigers not already harvested lope their dwindling range, two hundred as the hinge for their growled arc of existence, bones of the others ground to powders for old men’s potencies. One needs to feel the tug of the draft on skin, the drag of process utterly anciently itself. Faster, now, the pull is from birth through dwelling through dissolution, along lines streaming through us, ageless winds.