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The House Skin
skin, be empty sleep
you will dream
a motion not your own a motion
that is given give
up, touch be taken emptiness
lifts skin, be empty
THE HOUSE SKIN
In the clear night the hills
Do not deceive they are desperately near unwild
Beasts cling to their sides trustworthy
Horses cows goats all
In love with my children with yours
The gentle (even the bulls, even the horned
Heads) The hills lean back to heads'
To-and-fro munching the long
Narrow horse-faces plunged
In milk-bowls of stars pausing to lift their jaws
Awash in moonlight dripping from whiskers,
The wide faces of cows
Stretching leathery jowls their whale-
Tongues lapping galaxies leaning at any angle to ravines
To hillsides in perfect balance masticating
The slow clouds in their cuds
Filling their boulder-thick bodies
With fog to make them light the massive all-meat
Haunches gliding on hooves of gold
The sensitive tendons thin
Ankles those magical shock absorbers
Transferring weight to earth one hoof raised perhaps
Poised like the wrist of a ballerina
Or gently tapping for grass-
Clumps A child's breath of dreams
Envelops the peace of a mare draws her into a human
Field light-years of safety-alertness
Are lifted A morning thought
Swerves ... The child's lips
Are pressed to the skin of the house blood runs
In the plumbing the walls cave in cave
Out on the lungs of the bed his breath
Unsettles the roof a breathing
Without meets a breathing within a mare and her colt
Pasture in the yard grass in their throats
Is hair of the child's head
They lick his skin of the stones
The swing-ropes their manes flow over tall weeds
Of his limbs their delicate hooves
Tap at the soil of his cheek-
Bones kiss the gravel
Of his cranium beg to be let in to be let in and Oh
It is a floating the horses and child
Aloft in the one house-skin