Starving Horse
        Every man's memory is his private literature
                                        —Aldous Huxley

It is morning and no worse for it.
The rote sorrow of sirens is in the streets.
In Cezanne's Large Bathers, bodies become
wet clay, traceries, yet in the black bark
of the trees behind the dormitory there is
a savage simplification. I want this:
to be speech and spittle. A tongue lolling
in its juices. The hours are porous:
everything falls out of them—water
in your palms. It is a war between knowing
and believing, every longing with a secret shape.
We are twenty and walk together across
the frozen Sig pond. It is not pleasure
we've been seeking but sexual literacy.
We climb stairs and arrange our bodies
in the furniture of the lecture room. Words
burning holes in the air. The juice of it staining
our hands—while confections of clouds
are drifting past outside the windows.
To imagine art as a starving horse
in a distant field. The convex bowl of its ribs.
And all else is incidental movement.

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Copyright © 2012 Doug Ramspeck All rights reserved
from Mechanical Fireflies
Barrow Street Press
Reprinted by Verse Daily® with permission