HORSE By Johnny Rodger
Oh, how we laughed. Up until I saw one of those charts I hadn’t even known I was a horse. I’m still not sure. I certainly don’t feel long-faced about it. It’s hardly a prison sentence after all: if someone takes the bit from your muzzle (5) and smacks you on the croup (24) while you canter off into an open field all by yourself, obedience isn’t the last word they call out. It’s not a word I’ve ever said either. We can laugh, as I say, about it now: rollicking around, tossing our mane and kicking our hind legs up in the air. But how can you convince anybody, while in the roll of days you have a steel pin barring your quivering tongue, that you not only have the right word, but you are that word. It’s not that they don’t want to know. People spend hours gazing out the window at night or lying on their beds poring over old manuscripts, all in search of an answer. Meanwhile you stand by – I won’t say patiently, for in effect they’ve bound and gagged you, so you’re disqualified as it were, from any virtuous dumbness – you stand by, and your whole body swells with the burden of their history. It’s true that they so little understand flesh and weight that they routinely gorge themselves on it as if they expected that stuffing it in there would fill the hole caused by their opening their mouths to speak. They get, that is to say, things so typically topsy-turvy and back to front with their fetishising of the order of cause and effect and ignorance of all other relations. Stand but once alone, I’d say to them, on a frosty winter night in a quiet field and know the real distance between your pink nostril
(4) and your horny hoof (12), your white belly and the moon. What do they think – I gained my full bulk by eating grass? Well, they don’t think – or at least, not about me, Old Dependable. Not until my head droops, then theirs perk up – bless their Pavlovian souls – with the idea of the knackers. Words, as I think I said, have this way with them of getting detached from things and floating around like balloons full of laughing gas. And it’s not that I have no sense of humour. I laughed too, when I realised that it was only by torture and slavery that they could get that rise on this world. I’ve sweat more sense between the shafts of an afternoon, with blinkers on and the sting of a whip on my rump (24) than ever dreamt up at a writing desk. And I’d laugh again to hear anybody’s gloss on that. For here is mine: horse. And how do I know I’m up to it? I’m pulling some indifferent load slowly towards its destination, and step by step, as my iron shoes ring on the cobbles, and the veins thrill visibly on my neck (28), a world is being put in place. You may well point out that it’s not a world conceived of or projected by me. You might also say the concept ‘world’ exists independently of my effort straining at the jangling harness, that worlds could well exist as light as balloons and requiring no dripping sweat or chafed withers (26) to their formation. Okay, I don’t say that’s just academic, but it’s not this world. And my whole body speaks of progress in, through, from and to this world: this trunk-end chest (8) and barrel belly (30) didn’t mould themselves just for the poetry of it. Their very bulk
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and shape is the true expression of a long and variegated translation of one set of material circumstances into another. But no doubt translation is considered to be just a matter of cause and effect too. Seeing oneself as others see you, as it were. And no wonder folk look up into my great eyes with their own tiny orbs and think to see there horror and fright at all that lies before me. It’s more or less been all my doing, at the end of the day when it gets dark and the sums have been counted up. But then that’s the problem with them and their poetry, it’s an effortless epiphenomenon, a contemplation of results and the status quo. I won’t deny that on these simple terms even hocks (19) and hindquarters (33) can inspire poetry. But when they bank those beautiful images in the quiet forever of some secure vaults beside the rest of their resplendently immortal bullion, what is the reckoning for the work done? Do they look up from their writing desk and recognise the sound of the world outside as I keep it turning? Clip-clop, says the horsey, and you’d know me, for I’m the one not wearing asses ears.
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