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.
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poem by Adam Fitzgerald
Added by Poetry Lover
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