"That man put on a new woolen coat and went away like a thought"

That man put on a new woolen coat and went away like a thought.
In rubber flip-flops I struggled behind.
The time was six in the morning, the time of hand-me-downs, and it was freezing cold.
Six in the morning was like six in the morning.
There was a man standing under a tree.
In the mist it looked like he was standing inside his own blurred shape.
The blurred tree looked exactly like a tree.
To its right was a blurred horse of inferior stock,
Looking like a horse of inferior stock.
The horse was hungry, the mist like a grassy field to him.
There were other houses, trees, roads, but no other horse.
There was only one horse. I wasn't that horse,
But my breath, when I panted, was indistinguishable from the mist.
If the man standing at that one spot under the tree was the master,
Then to him I was a horse at a gallop, horseshoes nailed to my boot soles.

--Vinod Kumar Shukla

translated from Hindi by Arvind Krishna Mehrotra