Horse and Hammer

PETER KANE DUFAULT

His massive dignity — sixteen
hundred and forty pounds, the poll
of his hemp-hung colossal head
high as the crossbar on the weighing stall,
his half-ton haunches flared
off flanks as limber as steel, great crest
like the hump of a mastodon —
discount. LADIES AND GENTS, YOU HEARD
WHAT THE MAN SAID.
THIS HORSE GOES TO KILL. At best,
the auctioneer drops, momentarily awed,
into intelligibility. SEVENTY-NINE
CENTS ON THE POUND. A fat man
in the ring with a horsewhip
and cigar is making the titan
dance. (A cat couldn’t skip
livelier, wince with more exquisite
nerve to the whip’s crack.) God
knows he looketh afar off,
who carried for twenty-four years
white clouds and the Catskills on his back,
who wheeled in the width of a turned clod,
or, winters, warmed up a Dutchman’s barn
with the steady furnace of his heart. . . .
At one hundred twenty-five, he’s gone
to the fat horse butcher. Gone
to the dogs; to glue, his hoofs and ears
who could have carried Charlemagne
to the Elbe with all his armor on.