Another horse poem, "The Gift."
"When I offer the pear, and he takes it
with first, whiskered lips, and then teeth,
and soon it is no longer fruit but goes into betweeness
and vanishment, turning to pastern,
and tail, and good wall of the hoof,
and small tithing of gold for the pasture, or fire roads.
For always where there is offering, there is return.
When this happens, and he is careful,
even in greed, even in the indignity of his foolish--
no, it must be named true, his entirely goofy
adoration and long tongued worship of pears.
When he knows what is pear, what is hand, when
he looks in my face as he chews, and the crush slobbers out,
and foams bright as spent happiness onto my foot,
onto my sleeve, as I bend then to lift him a wedge
he has dropped.
When the heron holds steady in contemplation,
not a few feet away, its eyes once again closed
like two stones that have rested an hour in the sun,
and gone back into leaning, and dimness,
a little heat kept in them still.
When the late cars sweep by without pause, without seeing,
yet store in the blue shadowed beakers,
their own mild exchanges of hidden unworkable sweetness.
Then the world is that actress from a Sanskrit
poem, whose greatness was showing two feelings at once.
The mercies are boundless.
Every country is death's."