THE HORSE

Actually
clamoring open
with joy
the mere fact
of walking here
grown beyond fact
as the stray horse
leaps past all designation
or was a map
of myself turning on?
I could say anything now
in the vibration between selves
like a horse’s rippling flank
makes its conspiracy with greatness
a small and suffocating greatness
in the coarse rush to appear
I am nothing someone needs
or I am I am
the very substance of joy
clamoring open with scarlet tendrils
that break against the song
a hungry horse makes
in its desert ride
wet rhythmic red tendrils
that softly tear off
in gaping chasms
of summer thought
actually encumbered
by sunlight
the coarse
light of horses
stirring up insects
that glitter blissfully
in the contaminating dusk
I am nothing someone
needs more than light
nothing but an intermission
between patterns of self-light
which strobe across the bedroom
tricking every object into cinema
from the depths of hibernation
baroque horses of thought galloping
in the mantic pollution of joy
in the actual body breaking open
to form joy’s map of clamor

THE FLOWERS

Eternally returning
our faces birds
that roost and rut
in the hair’s mussed underbrush
fly away fly fly away fly
a cold idea arising there
in the wings’ frantic waft
the idea of zero
or all that remains
rudely driven out
like a dog
from flowers
huge yellow
ancient flowers
that I send
hurrying everywhere simultaneously
exuding the terror
that comes with understanding
that the universe you
observe serves only excess
The woman you love blows
the nose at the tip
of her tortoise shell glasses
and not even one blinking iota
burns out in an unnecessary flash
The birds our faces are fly
in and out with courageous urgency
which carries us past sleep
and into the startling dawn
of one moment after another
if only to throttle nothingness
in a yellow rage
if only to thread
tatters of your hand
with tatters of sky
and suffer endlessly
in yellow waves
that patiently drone
in and out
eternally returning
huge yellow
ancient flowers