The Isle of Horses

That night he left.
His eager oarlocks clicked into the dark
As if a clock told time into the past,
As tho' it ticked him back to yesterdays,—
Back to that island in a younger world
Where horses and their strength were once the thing. . . .

At last the island, the horned peaks,
The lightning flashing inland sullenly—
The sea was hardly wrinkled when he rowed
Into an oval harbor with a beach
So smooth that it reflected streaks of stars.
Such stars, they seemed the hyacinths of heaven,
Or frost-rimed globes of waxen clustered grapes
Hung overhead to tempt poor travelers there.
And underneath this arbor he walked on—
A path he knew—a twisted tree stood yet—
A great bird dreamed there, black, with smoldering eyes;
The very branch seemed withered where it perched.
It looked as if it might be waiting for …?

There in a flash of lightning lay the herd!
They lay with worn hoofs flung amid the grass,
Their hocks grown shaggy like old aloe clumps.
Others lay featly as slim unicorns,
With ready, nimble curve of supple knees;
Some slept among the meadow's rippled waves
And fetched their sudden breath as long and deep
As those bleached monsters from unangled depths
That rock a ship to fill black lungs with air.
All else was still, as if they waited dead
For some cold voice to hail them from the stars.
Till he cried, "Comrades!" called them each by name:
"Nicanor, Zat, Urion, Rigel, Don, …
Ho! This is Tibalt come to find you here!"

Their neigh, it seemed, tore through the grass like flame;
Earth shook, and they were all about him soon,
Trembling like centaurs that have scent of gods.
They formed a ring of nostrils and white eyes,
So he was orator to horses, with
Soft noses in his hands, and clover breath,
Damp, warm and sweet, upon his neck and cheeks;
A mad, dumb welcome that bespoke the soul
Behind the brute's long face, grown sorrowful,
Grown sorrowful with age; he cringed at that,
For he had thought their strength would keep them young.

They wept together that they had grown old,
Their heads hung low, with long and drooping manes;
His beard flowed sorrowfully across his breast;
Round tears dropped down upon his hands while stars
Burned more intensely like blue funeral lamps
Hung in the vaults of old priest-guarded tombs.

By that sad light poor Tibalt dimly saw
Ranged round the herd on every tree there sat
The sunless birds that wait for beasts to die,
Ruffling their silent plumage in the dark;
With muffled croakings dropping down and down
From branch to branch like withered autumn leaves;
At every hopeful silence drawing nigh.
But he loved stars too well to fear the night.

He woke the herd up with his hero's cry,
"Shake shadows off!"—
Their neigh made billowed darkness eddy back;
It startled sleeping eagles,—and they streamed
A gallop, gallop, gallop through the night,
As if poor Tibalt led them on to hope.

What hills they burst their hearts on; how they sank,
By pools or in the desert, each one knew.
Till only one among them thundered on
With Tibalt on his back whose tattered cloak
Flapped like a bat's wing at the haggard moon.
It seemed a devils' land they entered on,
No meadows now, the very stones struck fire,
As if the warmth of Tophet lingered yet,
A landscape just three miles outside of hell.
There on the mountain was the sorceress' house,
A glow behind its pillars like a fire;
Below was Tibalt riding for his life.
Or was it life? The huge horse staggered on
Into a vale where no breeze ever blew,
With dust that flowed like water; splashed like spray,
A valley in the midst of evil hills,
Flat-browed and horned, where lightnings flickered blue
From peak to peak, as if the giants flashed
Unrusted blades at fence amid the stars.
And once the traveling moon, so fast they rode,
Slid low behind the pillars on the crest—
Five black bars fell across the valley floor—
A furnace gate into an ashen place,
A trap for souls, a gate that must have clicked,
When Tibalt took the path down to the lake.

About it, gallows-armed, the cacti grew.
And, ah-h-h! Its waters! They were bitter salt,
A drink of disappointment Tibalt found,
No draught of youth, no vigor for old veins.
His horse stood still and lolled its tongue in dust;
While he sat still, both still as little birds,
That look through moonlight at a horny eye,
For such the lake seemed, glittering at the moon.

Out from the socket of that eye there grew,
Fringing the oval center darkly clear,
Long, undulating, yellow water plants
Like iris round a pupil always still
Of a huge eye uncovered by the earth.
To spy upon her enemies the stars
With hatred beyond thought, dim with green slime
Of floating cataracts, and horned around
The edges with dull plants, it liquid lay
And glittered knowingly upon the moon,
Amid the demon ridges that swept 'round
And 'round it like the wrinkles of earth's skull.
Here He might come to sit and whet his scythe,
Pondering a plague, and whistling through his teeth,
Watching his bird-track pinked along the dust,
You know Him well, or shall … Here Tibalt stopt
And felt his soul drawn down into that eye.

Deep in the pupil of that eye he saw
Upon a rock ledge like a crocodile,
A pot the filtered moonlight turned aglow,
Strange as a note within a serpent's eye,
As mystic as the sun in wells at noon.
Glittering as if it might have held lost youth. . . .

How splendidly he dived!

Flashed like the dauntless Tibalt of old days
Straight through the moon-black water—clasped the pot—
And then—
Something struck at him from a cavern door,
The pot sank with him, and one wrinkle crawled
As if the lake had shut its lidless eye.

Not it—it stared unwinking at the stars:
Grew Tophet-black, and in the setting moon,
Wide as the night-eye of an octopus
It watched poor Tibalt's horse hang down his head;
The white mane float across its liquid stare,
The eyes grow nearer, closer to its face,
While overhead the sunless birds began
To waft impatient gyres above the pool.