To a Boy Leading a Horse
Under a shudder of sun
A murmur of wood.
The opal sky impure as lead,
The air is gaunt and azure-sedged;
Combed with glass and mercury.
A marble tomb suspended.
§
Under the flesh of this sun
I fear for your tenderness, boy.
Though the wind is not more bronze
Than the crumpled ochre of your skin,
With the petal of your phallus
Outlined as the rest of your body
In chrome and creosote, your eyes imprinted
Wild with tarnished ash and flaking rock-flint —
What of you is permanent?
A gash of
Shadow leaks above your chin,
Shadows streak dark foliage cringing
Along your shins.
Dispatched in light but not of noon,
I know the world is claimed by litanies
Crude as your lips and soldered as your limbs.
Vacant and chartreuse, nude and loose
As a cratered stump
I know the body of a boy exceeds
—What red oaks rise from the blonde titan earth
And come to crumbled timber, broke shanks
And crippled paper.
Our breath is tenured
In wild shoots, pools and blanks of weather.
It permits of leisure
Its limits will not remember.
You, boy, who lead a horse hinged in silver,
Know, this is not elegy.
§
And yet, what else records
The accusation of an upright neck?
Plaintive, ordinate, an open form
Spanning the locked space between
Despair and what we know of prayer.
Infringed perpetually,
Hollow, cavernous, deprived
And permeated with presence
Wholly created and uncreated,
The singer is a mouth
Heaving heaven; severed, lavish
Dissolving increments caving
Towards light or light's brethren
But by light never sated.
To which we have heard it sung and said
As the mouth is clay and song
As you say, clasping hip
With more than shadow spilling from your lips:
I have my dead and do not mourn their going.
I have my dead, their peace is half my going
And half a peace I hold remote, and dread.
Flowing over the stricken calyx of my palm
My grasp extends and grasps for what visible
Region reigns within a terror our eyes tread,
Towards elsewhere, askew, groping the invisible
Until the dark has blossomed, concrete and calmed.
We have breathed as leaders with corrupted knowing,
The imagination is a steed, cryptic, fleet, unknowing.
poem by Adam Fitzgerald
Added by Poetry Lover
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