Sestina for why girls love horses.

In the dark many gulps
are teaching girls how to drink with a pony
at the end of each hand, an artifice
that is not really there, something beyond rustic
beyond help from boys, who wish to advise
but find the impossible cornered in some kind of race

boys who are the darlings abhor the race
their fingers gently pass over borders, elicit gulps
of pleasure, or dream in European tongues and advise
the building of small churches, where at their altars stand a pony
and a virgin made entirely out of tattoos, of myths so rustic
they hurt. All those girls in the dark, bemoaning the architecture of artifice

wailing prayers to be or nothing or just horses etched in the artifice
of each church wall. In the dark, shouts teach girls about the race
riots of moths, silk burning wild bright, stampeding holes into garments rustic
and uncouth with splendor. Let them in, the stampede of gulps
undertaken in unlearning static motion. Pony,
in a gallop of fingers, she said to me: Seek, advise.

Or rather, if you are a girl (said some boy): pray, advise.
It turns out the boys are jealous, mantled in artifice
they suggest walls doors locks keys. They hate the pony.
The shimmer of category in the morning; they love race.
girls listen close in the barn, many gulps,
many perfect arches of the neck, are they now rustic?

They are first cavernous, dark, like Conrad says. Later on, rustic.
Left to numb and chortle, girls secretly advise
each horse toward the love of air in naked gulps,
and never believing in the act of artifice.
In the dark continues the race,
each morning the winner is a black white grey brown pony.

Each sunset, the dark finds a girl in the arms of a pony.
Is it then the boy knows her as rustic?
No. boys see only the race
caught in the throat to reveal how girls advise
the dismantle always of the artifice,
that old succubus, an ancient liar with all the wrong gulps.

But they are fastened to one another through an eternity of gulps
and the horses begin to squeal and advise:
beware in the dark, girls, the boys who love your artifice.