I love the horse at Lascaux
Half the world
Risen from the very earth
So unsecured and fast
Legs vanishing
Even as we look
No one to tame her
Only the river’s light
**
It wouldn’t work for me, the poem you write
My private dead
Hang around too much, poems
Are cold here
In this region of floating baskets
**
A dream of teeth and I woke chewing a rope—a French knot from the Commune, tied with vengeance. Stars at the window, topiary gardens in the distance. If only I could escape my bonds. My dear life, my stubborn jaws and the hourglass just out of reach. “Oh poetry,” I cried, “what apparatus of report have we here?”
**
One night
In London
I saw a man
Talking gently to a statue
His earnestness
A thing of alchemical
Beauty
As if he too
Had been a rose
Or become Europa
Had loved
The queen—
Keeping her alive…
**
Morning custom:
Keep with dream-prayers,
Whisper, look into the lake.
Hold fast, don’t be troubled,
Sadness waits in the library.
**
In my poems, or, go ask Freud:
Old lovers flit through the trees—
Ah but what kind of trees—
Birches with gold ringlets
By the lake
Sometimes
High in the branches
Trolls look down at me
Just a boy really
Searching
For mushrooms
**
If you can drag yourself to believe
God’s eyes are on this morning
All great things are yet to come
**
Something we can miss
Leaves shaded perfectly for morning
Paths for both hands
Echoes in rooms
Sometimes our eyes were bitter
When birds had flown away
**
Poetry happens off the page
Until it sustains something
Like an injury, a twisted neck
Arriving at the page-clinic
Conceding a belief
In predestination—here
On a tiny ball
Everyone’s a poet
For love begins
Taking us places,
Though at the doctor’s
We have so many wounds
One wonders how we travelled far
I fill my bag with apples
Disengaging myself
From the corpses of me—
(Whitman’s phrase)
Then walk uphill
Without plans at all
Planet of the Blind 