A Horse Is Not a Usual Menace

A HORSE IS NOT A USUAL MENACE


there have been so many though.
Buddenhagen’s cows. All those
north Germans lean and bitter that I knew
we ate eggy pancakes in their boarding houses,
spare men lovelessly devout.
I have prejudices. Baltic. Riding horses.
I love those places. Can I be beautiful again
the way the rain was if I be not wet?
Silver trays and salvias red as rockets,
fluttermice on mountain garden,
the wood is wet and what secret
is hidden in your body? Why do I wake
to you of all people after such a storm?
You will weep upon my page if I let you,
you sky, good morning, goldfinch.
And you me of me,
lurking in my underwear
to wield a day against the world and make
some sense of it that never has been
said. And sometimes let it be true.
Body is the leaf
and spirit is the soft green pod
and what’s the pea inside?
We have no name yet for that seed,
the pulse of life, the scattered
remnant in our midst of something
inconceivable, something of which
Being is just the husk.
The feathered snake went in before us
soaring to that gap behind the sun,
the other side of anything you say.


Robert Kelly

Posted over on Charlotte Mandell

from MAY DAY: Poems 2003-2005