A Paper Horse

ROBERT W. WATSON

A PAPER HORSE

Tonight the world's roof burns,

The yellow roof of the last palace of a living God

Blackens in my dreams: my spirit shrinks in bed.

How childish habits persist! In bed before sleep

I unfold my mind's map in the dark and mark

A place to sleep, a tent near Lhasa,

Where in the distance I may see the gold-roofed Potala.

Within the God-King, a boy,

Sleeps in one of its one thousand rooms,

Or wakeful, watches his subjects through a telescope.

In bed before sleep I journey to Tibet to sleep.

In mountain climbing gear, I rise through snow,

Lean into the winds of invisible Everest,

Rest on a gorge's frozen lip, dream there

Of the Abominable Snowman on whose lip, perhaps, I lie;

Then slide, now in real sleep, down a glacier

On the mountain's other side,

As a child on my sled I coasted in Passaic

At night down Aycrigg Avenue, and at the bottom,

By a bonfire, my father stood to take me home to bed

And dreams of coasting down a steeper hill.

Tonight the world's roof burns,

God, a youth in glasses, flees on horseback;

Among sword swinging Khambas circles North,

And at the sound of shots, or demons, stops.

His fur-capped lords then serve him buttered tea.

They wait, twist turquoise earrings, huddle against mules.

But now the oracle speaks, his astrologers concur.

They turn South, wade over the drifting snow, scale

The kingdom's ice-faced walls and down;

God descends from his heaven of snow and stone,

From his last kingdom, his last palace,

Where on the roof, still burning, his bodies

Salted, boiled in butter, face with gilded eyes,

The snow and smoke packed wind. Nearby,

A priest snips paper horses for lost travelers,

Last travelers, loosens them in the wind,

Turning prayer wheels,

Turning oak leaves outside my bedroom window,

Turning clothes on the line my wife has forgotten.

nots: "Where on the roof. . .": These two lines are to be understood literally

and, as far as the author can tell from the books on Tibet, most of which are highly

unreliable, the lines are factually accurate. "His bodies": the previous incarnations

of God. The bodies of the common people are hacked apart on a hillside and birds

pick the bones clean. But the bodies of the God-King are actually salted, boiled in

Yak butter, painted gold, and placed on the roof of the Potala.