Horse-Rider's Ding-Dong Pace Poem by Felix Bongjoh

(song of a long-distance horse-rider)


(i)

Riding a horse
is pole-vaulting over
the gossamer bar
deep in inner self,

but high up above
stars sailing in seas
of sky, close
to your shoulder
as a playing child's kite.

Hour rides hour
on a rocky day's climb
and flying
along a sharp-angled
descent with wings,

free-wheeling
down, down
the digging slope -

crossing the bridge
of distance
between two hanging
poles of stiff
standing cliffs.

(ii)

And minute
bicycles
the horse of dawn

into the stretched-out
hole of sinking,
roasted and baked

into dusk's brown mist,
to make saddle
gallop with tics
and horse-rider's wiggles

into a valley's
Mariana Trench,
the nadir
of a deep, deep fall,

the bedrock
that bleeds, wings burnt
into flint ash,
the tapered breadth
of breath.

How life leaks
through a hole of fear,
each thrust
of horse legs,

riding a tiptoeing
tracking thrust,
a cricket's weak feet
winding the wick

of a drowning
lantern lowered
down a ditch.

(iii)

O lantern drown
no more
into life's deep hole
of night,

but canter and gallop
across boulders
that push me off
a horse's saddle,

as I lose life's
steering wheel digging
into my drained-
out spine, a rocky

mountain
that doesn't break
down and down

into waddling feet,
the quacking duck
standing on
ripple riding ripple.