i once knew a man
i once knew a man who had wild horses killed.
when he told about it
the words came galloping out of his mouth
and shook themselves and headed off in
every damn direction. his tongue
was wild and wide and spinning when he talked
and the people he looked at closed their eyes
and tore the skins off their backs as they walked away
and stopped eating meat.
there was no holding him once he got started;
he had had wild horses killed one time and
they rode him to his grave.
I taught this poem, many years ago, in first-year college composition classes as an example of complex use of metaphor. The students generally had a terrible time with it. So many wrote how awful it was that the horses came back to run him down. The poem to me is so clearly dream-like and mythopoetic, rooted in the literal world but branching extravagantly in the ether, as poetry will do. But my students were not very familiar with metaphor or ether. Of course, they were only seventeen or eighteen years old and more adept at being good students than at life.
I can't say, then, that I "taught them" this poem. I introduced them to it. Who knows, maybe some of them are haunted by its phrases and wish they could remember where they read it, or when.
