All in town go by water
and talk with the water, desire
to be water: a dress of ten thousand hands.
The water received the water
and they made a great deal of joy to see one another.
I left off my great skirt
and went to sell a horse
for a dish of herrings.
king in a box
to surprise us
as once he did
bolt wheels to a horse
went away and left us
our little iron lie
What does it mean to be average? When a computer averages the features from hundreds of faces, the resulting image will look like a supermodel. This tells us that what is average is not necessarily common, and vice versa.
But I love the idea of this perfect face held in common, each of us contributing our own small part to it. Together we are conventionally beautiful. As individuals we can be uncommonly beautiful.
first day of fall
a harrow’s
yellow teeth
A haze of jewelweed sprouts,
the dimpled embryonic leaves
like conjoined twins.
From the valley, the sound
of horses pulling a buggy
in their eight steel shoes.
The crooked sassafras—
something has found under its bark
a blood-colored door.
I remember the Moorkiller’s
stone horse in Logroño,
its terrible phallus.
Near the steps that pilgrims
once bloodied with their knees,
the jolly lacemaker.
We yield the road
to sheep, a bicycle race,
old men bowling in the afternoon.
Ice is a house I could
not stay in, the answer to
a tune I never hear.
Tell me how I promise forever
in the present, with fiddles and songs
and an old horse at grass.
Which trouble
is the truth, coming into the streets
to stand?
A tired white
old nag
standing forlorn
Among sagebrush
on a cold day
are his thoughts
Only of the cold
the weariness
how would he feel
With his belly
full of straw
in a warm stable
Would he then
be thinking
of young mares
Disquiet
The surest thing there is is we are riders,
And though none too successful at it, guiders,
Through everything presented, land and tide
And now the very air, of what we ride.
What is this talked-of mystery of birth
But being mounted bareback on the earth?
We can just see the infant up astride,
His small fist buried in the bushy hide.
There is our wildest mount--a headless horse.
But though it runs unbridled off its course,
And all our blandishments would seem defied,
We have ideas yet that we haven’t tried.
Whenever we worked at the creekside shed
there was always something else to do
such times as we were stumped, or nails ran short,
or the sun reached round the fir and baked us down
from raftering, roofing, or the like. We leaned,
gossip-like, against the fresh framing
of the walls, sipping solar tea,
watching the edge of a cloud's long skirt
chase the neighbors' horses leisurely
across their pasture, down the camas swale
and up the other side, against the black contrast
of maple-shrouded hills. The horses liked
to amble up to our corner, stand and watch.
We couldn't cure them of the shies,
though we might try with handfuls
of our green grass, or a few choice
Troika, troika! The snow moon
whirls through the forest.
Where lamplight like a knife
gleams through a door, I see two graybeards bending.
They're playing chess, it seems. And then one rises
and stands in silence. Does he hear me passing?
Troika, troika! In the moonlight
his spirit hears my spirit passing.
I whip the horses on. The houses vanish.
The moon looks over fields
littered with debris. And there in trenches
the guardsmen stand, wind fluttering their rags.
And there were darker fields without a moon.
I walk across a field, bound on an errand.
The errand's forgotten — something depended on it.
A nightmare! I have lost my father's horses!
Tonight my memory is
a palomino exuberantly hooved
in an alpine meadow.
I ride the palomino bareback
and fall off, replacing air
in lungs with fear,
pushing fear out and breathing
again. I hold out
a sugar-cube on a flat palm
for my memory,
which nuzzles with a soft
gray mouth, nips
the cube, leaves lovely
equine slobber. The tail flicks out
at a fat fly, makes broom sounds.
Sunlight, the old sheriff, jumps
We started speaking,
Looked at each other, then turned away.
The tears kept rising to my eyes
But I could not weep.
I wanted to take your hand
But my hand trembled.
You kept counting the days
Before we should meet again.
But both of us felt in our hearts
That we parted for ever and ever.
The ticking of the little clock filled the quiet room.
“Listen,” I said. “It is so loud,
Like a horse galloping on a lonely road,
As loud as that--a horse galloping past in the night.”
You shut me up in your arms.
But the sound of the clock stifled our hearts’ beating.