Wind Horses
 
 
I come round the curve,
round this ribbon of
Pacific highway— 
conspiring, it seems,
 
with the seaward storm
to slip my small car
onto the ocean
pounded rocks below— 
 
and I catch a glimpse
of grey, horse-headed
waves, breaking
into the headlong wind.
 
Each cresting curl
streams a white mane of
spray, wind stripping it
away by degree.
 
The gauzy curtain
of rain undulates,
strangely sensual,
like a restless ghost.
 
Ecstatic trees whip,
whirl like dervishes,
cast their weakest limbs
down before my way.
 
Oh, how the ancient
mammalian map
within me yearns so
to curl up tightly,
 
to wrap my long tail
around my wet nose
and sink down into
some dark winter cave.
 
What fierce current drives,
these crashing horses
wind-stripped to the shore,
keeps me from my cave?
 
I only know this:
it’s the same that pulls me
from below, ever
forward to be stripped
 
clean if I let it,
bare if I resist.
And it is pulled
by a pitiless moon.





Gravity
 
 
The acts of waking tired
and rising to the stiff-backed day,
 
of inhabiting the orange sparks
of pain in neck, shoulder, knee--
 
you thought they were a tax
levied on every stair
 
by the endlessly circling stars,
the shuttering moon. So did I.
 
Until I saw my rashness
begin to disintegrate
 
along with my ligaments;
my peace rise, with the tide
 
of peptic acid. Things are
slowly unstrung
 
by entropy's long fingers— 
sleep, joints, certainty, indignation.
 
After all this time of gaining,
there is, it seems, a time
 
of stripping away. A time to
let gravity do its slow work
 
and you do your own.
They are the same.