Poetry

That landscape—unpeopled, unburiable, sun-stunned—
Lifts me re-orphaned out of language
Into the nomenclature of stones,
unangeled, unsought-for.

We lay out our own dark end,
guilt, and the happiness of guilt.

Seventy years, and what’s left?
Or better still, what’s gone before?
A couple of lines, a day or two out in the cold?
And all those books, those half-baked books,
sweet yeast for the yellow dust?

It’s dark now, the horses have had their half-apple,
mist and rain,
Horses down in the meadow, just a few degrees above snow.