On the Mane

You ascend through the horse, which is a sentence I have waited my whole career to write: elevator up the tail, stairs through the chest, and out onto the viewing platform that sits in the horse's mane, with the khan's enormous steel face above you and the steppe running flat to every horizon.

The wind up there means business. I laughed most of the time, involuntarily, at the sheer commitment of the object: a nation put a public balcony in a horse's mane, and the balcony works, and the view is imperial in every sense.

Below, tour buses the size of toys. Beyond them, the grass that produced all of this. Architecture that lets you stand inside its metaphor: I know books that manage less.