"a horse roughly broken/ steaming in the sleet"
More Perihelion:
Bob Sward's Writer's Friendship Series
Cleaning the Icons
*
There is mention of you
You could be a little happy again
in your small empty car
headed for invisible wildernesses,
a naughtment of the self,
with Egyptian elements only: your
body, your name, and your shadow.
*
You must move very slowly
to see inclusions
in this glare
always with us, radiopaque
at night, quiet office
of the Rhone glacier,
river that ends in a desert flower,
minutes to look at the dead,
span of a life.
*
String gives way to wool, fur or hair
beginning with the earliest years
binding a soft thing
to a truck,
(a dance), the (handicapped)
moving only their arms
like seagrasses, conceptual art, each
a tiny movie star.
*
Heaven’s litmus blue
plosive
held for a stutter,
sweet language of
school girls
punctuated with hearts, severed
vocal chords
of fifty laboratory
cats—
still crossing space,
authorizing
this.
*
Through the airbells of early glass
blue radiates most
red and yellow throw their gleams further
and in the evening
near a much admired lake
with feathered arrows,
black silk sutures,
you know what to do.
*
Snowfall
a natural peaceful disposition,
transparency
and water.
Lambs are born
and forests bloom under powder
in Lapland,
with souls of cork,
avalanche masks,
great poodles
leaping from life to death,
a safe place to sleep.
*
Once you split open,
saw the flower inside,
travelers bringing back views,
all in the same guise,
a horse roughly broken
steaming in the sleet
by the coping stone-
almost like being alive.
*
No one has any idea they are there.
During the first cleaning
something in the limewood stirring,
coming up through the reaches
of dark varnish,
a saint,
the incarnation of a girl
suddenly after two thousand years
while heavy balanced birds
fly over,
fire brings forth from the gound
pink,
and everything is unburdened.
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