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