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  Earthenware model of a horse, unglazed   I, too, am a survivor My eroded coat dappled with lichen and stars My spirited tail has long  snapped off    One millennium and then another  has wheeled on by  since the potter squatting on his dusty stool thumbed my jowls   to the perfect roundness – a gesture  tender despite his production line – and nicked  my nostrils in this haughty flare ‘Stocky’  they called me    in the catalogue I admit,   though hollow, my belly’s a swollen gourd, buddha-full  Ears pricked, mane brush-stiff,  my grin is quizzical, sometimes   even a grimace behind the smudgy glass  My hooves were long  buffed by clay ranks of imperial grooms    Reserved for only the finest tombs my kind maps out the trade  between civilisations –  one squat stallion for fifty bales of silk    They rolled out the Silk Road before us  all the way to the walled city of Chang’an The Han emperor sent for us to fill  his echoing stables He called us his Tian ma,    ‘celestial horses’, expecting our hardy stock  when the time came  at last to carry him up the narrow passes  into heaven Some nights    I dream  of galloping across scrubby plains, the herd’s sweat  tart as highland apricots around me – far blue peaks retreating into memory              Porcelain tea caddy painted in underglaze blue   Far blue peaks retreating into memory as wizened cedars twist against a glaze    of sky A pagoda perched on a lonely outcrop where a scholar might withdraw to think –    or dream, perhaps, of cicadas thrumming  through misty branches, singing of past lives   as long-sleeved concubines, or frustrated literati  These painted scenes of oriental whimsy I reveal   might snatch the gaze of a well-heeled visiting gent but are studiously ignored by these lily-fingered    daughters of the prosperous Liverpool merchant – a man of great taste, my owner, he spotted me    half-buried on a stall of flighty fans and girdles   His girls will learn to pour this steaming, still-exotic    brew that measures everything from Empire’s  horizon to the charms of fashionable girlhood   while glancing coyly – spout poised – from the corner  of an eye I watch it all from