Kioka believes in the universal horse which alone
Has given substance and spirit to all fact.
It is from the universal horse that brown leaf-ponies
Have learned in autumn how to press and harry
One another, how to part and gather again, pushing
Frantically across the lawn, raising dust in their rush
And veer down the dirt road.
And the accumulated rocks comprising the great heights
Of the forested mountains to the west are simply
All the inverted stone hoofprints made long ago
By the timeless pony as it galloped back and forth
Over the antediluvian plains of the ancient earth.
The alert vacancy of late winter is the pause,
The hesitation of the universal horse at the precipice,
That space of contemplation, too pure and distant
To freeze, held in the white of its eyes as it stammers
And blows thin frost, as it wheels and rears
To gallop away like spring in the opposite direction.
And language simply breaks apart and categorizes
The total horse experience—”seaweed tangled
Like a long mane in the salt-wet wind,” “sunlight
Standing like slender dozing ponies in the shade
Of summer poplars,” “fog pervading tall weeds
And grasses like the ghost of a stallion dreaming
Of the consuming motions of its mating
In the field.”
Sex, as Kioka knows it in undefiled darkness,
Is the universal horse nuzzling and breathing
At the crotch, its soft snout nudging
And nipping at the crotch.
And the sound of heavenly infinity is the wildness
Of that horse, and the heaven in the ceremony
Of passion is the domesticity of that horse.
Without the brilliant substance and spirit
Of the continuous horse, how could the moon
Have adapted itself so well to the limitations
Of its own silver stakes and tethers?
The universal horse, undiscovered, is not universal.
Kioka, without discovering his belief
In the universal horse, is not universal master.
Imagine how he must mount then, clinging
And reining, both the one borne and the one leading,
The one carried and the one guiding, whipping
And caressing, approaching the widest ravine,
All stars above and all stars below.
And during the crisis of the ride, (Doesn’t everyone know?),
It is the urging stride of his words spoken
In the language of galloping hooves over the earth
Which gives all fact and all substance and all success
To that lonely leap.
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