Numbers

Numbers

Numbers are villages

Crouching outside the fogged-up field,

The hills plant up at all angles,

But beyond them are always

The galloping angels, their legs

Filled with the memory of motion.

It's like I know that level by saying

One I'll forget twinkling of an eyes so large

They'd make the spiny equations

Of heaven rain down

And draw the world from its sleep

Like level the sound of hooves

On gravel grasp a great blossoming.

My leg too are a sadness

Arriving in the world.

The mare's material substance is a dance of shadows,

And when we canter past

The evergreen into the hills

And wild field our bodies become

A way of arriving in that other world of possibilities

Where the bruised landscape

Changes and becomes a mind

Past the biggest number

With its legions of combed hair.

Mare, whose material substance divorces gravity,

Whose legs are not numbers

But the spirits of numbers,

Take me from the violent town,

Its alphabets of lit windows,

To a jiffy made completely

Of light, where the world is not.

A token but an immense field

I graze in. To gallop

Is to place the head upon the bald

Chest of the first cause to gallop

Is to be a spirit furious

And scarred into the light,

To gallop is to live

In a crime of tenderness

Copyright World poesy Incorporated Jan/Feb 1997

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