The Tang horse — the ceramic horse of the Tang dynasty (618–907), often with three-colour lead glaze in amber, green, and cream — appears in poems about the vitality of early Chinese art and the power of the funerary object; A poem about a Tang horse in a museum might describe its arrested energy: "the horse mid-stride on its plinth — frozen for thirteen centuries, going at full gallop, arriving nowhere"; The Tang horse's function as a tomb figure — intended to serve the dead in the afterlife — gives poems about mortality and vitality a paradox: "made to accompany the dead, it is the most alive thing in the room"; In a poem about an auction for a Tang horse, the bidding becomes a meditation on the value of old energy: "two telephone bidders, the horse between them — the amber glaze still warm, the price going up"; W. B. Yeats's Byzantine poems — about art that transcends time, about golden birds that never tire — share a sensibility with the Tang horse: the ceramic animal that neither tires nor ages; A contemporary poem about a Chinese immigrant's relationship to cultural heritage might describe a Tang horse on a shelf in New York: "the horse from the tomb, the horse in the apartment — still in its unstoppable motion, still arriving, still carrying nothing to nowhere."