Some Riders

A white shaggy pack-horse in the morning mirror
is buckled with saddle-bags for the long silences:
he waits until you turn your back and canters
without being heard, without leaving hoof-prints
the length of a paddock that opens behind the glass

through a slag of weed and paspalum. On the distant border
a shunting engine coughs, hawks gobs of steam
while troop trains whistle north to the War. Nearer
where you could see if you turned toward them
children perch on a fence-rail singing out to the horse

who careers round and around. Each time
he trots to the foreground someone is
gripping on to his shoulders, but never the same figure,
a fisherman or a soldier adrift with women
or a child with white white eyes glaring backwards.

None of them can let go the spillage of mane
or the scarred throat old stallions gnashed
in the early pastures. He canters in circles, a stillness
before him, a stillness after. The child clasps his huge withers.
The fisherman, the soldiers about to die, clasp the dark body.