A borrowing

"In the end, everyone is aware of this: nobody keeps any of what he has, and life is only a borrowing of bones."

The Weight

Two horses were put together in the same paddock.
Night and day. In the night and in the day
wet from heat and the chill of the wind
on it. Muzzle to water, snorting, head swinging
and the taste of bay in the shadowed air.
The dignity of being. They slept that way,
knowing each other always.
Withers quivering for a moment,
fetlock and the proud rise at the base of the tail,
width of back. The volume of them, and each other’s weight.
Fences were nothing compared to that.
People were nothing. They slept standing,
their throats curved against the other’s rump.
They breathed against each other,
whinnied and stomped.
There are things they did that I do not know.
The privacy of them had a river in it.
Had our universe in it. And the way
its border looks back at us with its light.
This was finally their freedom.
The freedom an oak tree knows.
That is built at night by stars.

I Meant To Do My Work Today

I meant to do my work today,
But a brown bird sang in the apple tree,
And a butterfly flitted across the field,
And all the leaves were calling me.
And the wind went sighing over the land,
Tossing the grasses to and fro,
And a rainbow held out its shining hand,
So what could I do but laugh and go?

Richard LeGallienne 

I cannot walk past

I cannot walk by day as now I walk at dawn
Past the still house where you lie sleeping.
May the sun burn away these footprints on the lawn
And hold you in its warmth and keeping

Vikram Seth

With only this one dream

Understand, I'll slip
quietly away from the noisy
crowd when I see 
the pale stars rising, blooming over
the oaks. I'll pursue solitary
pathways through the pale
twilit meadows with only this
one dream: you come too.

Absence

My love,
we have found each other
thirsty and we have
drunk up all the water and the blood,
we found each other
hungry
and we bit each other
as fire bites,
leaving wounds in us.

But wait for me,
keep for me your sweetness.
I will give you too
a rose.

Grates and Bridges

Before I knew people could die of cancer
not just overdoses, but that adult diseases
loomed like humid clouds over every city
waiting for any random person to walk beneath them—

I was twenty-three years old and just moved
to New York with two hundred dollars and a puppy.
The first day I took the subway on my own
from Brooklyn to a temp job in Manhattan
I was so proud, arriving, the doors opening
and me forging through a mist of people.

I wanted to throw my arms over my head victoriously
and smile at every exhausted commuter
but no one was in the mood—I was in New York, after all.

This was long before 9/11—New York was falling apart
in a different way, newscasters would get in small motorboats
and go with engineers to the underbelly of the Brooklyn Bridge
on exposés where their vessels rocked precariously in the waves
and they reached out and tore off giant chunks of concrete
from the base of the bridge like Sunday bread—
then held them up to the video camera in disgust.

I walked blocks to my temp job, quickly down the sidewalk,
with a coffee in my hand—the coffee was so sweet
going down my throat.  It was January.  Can you imagine?
Me in my too-big thrift store Navy band shoes I bought
to look professional and my dollar pants slipping down my thin waist.
When I think of New York, I think of being hungry,
with my whole hungry life in front of me.

I walked block after block across grates in the sidewalk
there were two kind of grates: one, a manhole with latticed bars,
a giant pie top, steaming in the street.