The Talking Horse and the Sad Girl and the Village Under the Sea Read Free Page A

back.
    They say Prometheus was forced
to use a part of every animal
when making Man, and put the short fuse
of the savage lion in our guts.
    Anger brought Thyestes to his grisly end
and goads all conquerors to raze
great towns and arrogantly plough
their walls into the earth.
    Don’t let yourself be swept away. The same fire
burned in me when I was young, and wrecked
those golden days by driving me to write
those poems in the white heat of the moment.
    But I would gladly change those bitter lines
into a sweet song and strike out every harsh word
if you would give me back your heart
and be my lover.

Miaow
    Consider me.
I sit here like Tiberius,
inscrutable and grand.
I will let “I dare not”
wait upon “I would”
and bear the twangling
of your small guitar
because you are my owl
andfoster me with milk.
Why wet my paw?
Just keep me in a bag
and no one knows the truth.
I am familiar with witches
and stand a better chance in hell thanyou
for I can dance on hot bricks,
leap your height
and land on all fours.
I am the servant of the Living God.
I worship in my way.
Look into these slit green stones
and follow your reflected lights
into the dark.
    Michel, Duc de Montaigne, knew.
You don’t play with me.
I play with you.

Woof
    I’m in the manger, sleeping.
Let me lie.
You bite me, everybody wants to know.
I bite you, no one gives a damn.
Why bark yourself
and keep me in this hole?
You let me slip,
I fight, you call me off.
I’d speak in Latin
but I’d make a dinner of it.
So let me return, as ever, to my vomit.
All the guilty are in my house.
I’m sick, tired, gone,
the ugly girl, the ditched butt
of every cigarette,
every hard crust, every wasted evening.
Sit. Fetch. Heel.

I’m old. I cannot learn new tricks,
but I will have my day.
My star will rage
and I will match you step for step
in the midday sun
and haunt you in this black coat
through my watches of the night.
    I’m your best friend,
but the more I get to know of you,
the more I like myself.

Gemini
    You did the Hippy-Hippy Shake.
I messed with Mr. In-Between.
Tonight you’ll hit the first three chords
of “Crazy” and a thousand tiny
lights will make you half-believe
the sky has fallen at your feet.
I’ll watch a documentary
about the life of Cary Grant,
then take a bath and go to bed.
    You’ll blunt the come-down with some sweet
brown sugar in a five-star suite
and wake from the recurring dream
in which your third wife fucks the pool-boy,
and see, across the bed,
a tattoo stallion on the shoulder
of a girl your daughter’s age
and hope she’ll keep on faking sleep
until you’re halfway to a strong
black coffee and a cigarette
in Mother Mary’s Bar ‘n’ Grill.
    I’ll read the Sunday magazines
and find you bathing in that pop
and glare of being seen you’ve lived with
all your life, which burns and bleaches
everything until the route you took
and everyone you left behind
have turned to vapour trail and backdrop.
    Did it have to be like this,
the future like a fault in flint
it took a hammer-blow to find?
Did you feel a different North
and peel away? Or was your gift
to slip the leash of every story
that we told ourselves to mend
the absence that you left behind?
    This, for what it’s worth, is mine:
I passed the bottle which said
Drink Me,

but you drank, and grew and grew
until the town, your family
and friends were all too small for you.
And by the summer you were gone.
    I wake some nights at 5 a.m.
and, shuffling to the window, see
a figure standing on the gravel
just outside the porchlight’s range
and wonder what it is you want,
to mock me, or make amends?
To come inside, or take my hand
and lead me to a black Mercedes
purring on the hill? To get
some measure of how many miles
you’ve put between us, or how few?
    I feel the tug of gravity
which everyone who knows you feels,
but turn and potter back to bed
and melt into that larger dark
where you will always orbit, far out,
lord of hearts and oceans, lit
by sunlight borrowed from the far