about how the horse trough must feel

with its green algae and orange rivets

having come in at the tail-end

of several thousand years of horse travel
and most of it in another hemisphere

where but yesterday lancashire cotton

replaced beaverskin. How otiose, how belated

this uncanny child of an earlier phase
of comparatively virile decadence

compared with the impression, like birds

flying by night, of abstract words truly chosen

by themselves; but they are bats, equipped
with a sensory apparatus all their own—

unlike these misnamed marsupials