Four short lines, no capital letters, no punctuation, and somewhere inside them a whole understanding between a woman and a horse. The title leads us to expect a familiar figure, the horse whisperer who murmurs something magical into an animal's ear. The poem quietly moves the secret elsewhere. It is her hand, not her voice, that "tells things to a horse," and what it tells is left unspecified. We are never given the words, probably because there aren't any. The central idea is that this kind of communication is real but not mystical. It is made of touch, patience and shared ground, and it belongs as much to the landscape as to the person.
The opening, "off road her hand," is already slippery. With no article and no verb, "off road" works like a camera caption, placing us away from tarmac and signposts, on a track where a horse is more at home than an engine. But "off" also hints at something unofficial, off the record, off the map. Then the syntax loosens further. "That plain going on" could describe the horse (a horse that plain, going on), or the things being told (a plain, ordinary continuing), or the country they travel through, since a "plain" is also flat open land. "Going on" suggests both walking forward and the everyday "goings-on" of life. The poem refuses to choose. With no punctuation to pin the grammar down, meaning drifts from rider to horse to terrain, just as the two of them move together.
The last line makes the boldest claim: "no art to it but hill and haze." On the surface this strips away the mystique. Nothing is being performed, and there is no technique to sell. Whatever passes between hand and horse is as unshowy as weather. Yet there is a gentle irony, because a poem that says "no art" is of course a made thing, and its shaping shows everywhere. The poem seems to describe its own ideal, language as plain as a hand laid on a neck. It also ends on scenery rather than on the human figure. Haze blurs edges, and perhaps that is the point, since the whisper can't be pinned down any more than the outline of a distant hill. The word may also suggest that we watch from far enough away that woman and horse are half lost in the view.
The craft is easiest to hear in the sounds. Almost every word is a single syllable, and "going" is the only exception. The plainness of the diction enacts what the poem says. The lines grow from four syllables to five, five, then eight, so the final line stretches out like the land opening up after three tight, close lines. At the start, "off road" puts two heavy stresses side by side, a little like a slow hoofbeat, before the line moves on. There is no end rhyme, but quieter echoes hold things together. "Hand" returns in the "and" of "hill and haze." The h of "her hand" carries through "horse," "hill" and "haze," linking the woman to the animal to the land. "Plain" and "haze" share a long vowel, so the "plain going on" seems to dissolve into the haze that closes the poem. The missing full stop matters too, because the poem doesn't end so much as keep going on.
What makes it worth reading is how much it trusts so little. In four lines it takes a romantic cliché and gives it back as something humbler and more believable, with skill as attention rather than magic. It also shows a poem doing what it describes. It tells us a great deal without raising its voice, and it leaves the rest to the reader, much as the hand leaves the rest to the horse.