Classic Poem

Come near come nearer
my white young filly
Come nearer my strong delicious filly
Come nearer my filly in season
Your words are songs and hymns
I heard them before I was born
They lullabied me quietly to sleep
I heard them on wedding nights when the dancers sang
I heard them in church above choirs of chanters
I heard them from the lips of my beloved
while we grappled in a tangle of bedsheets

Come nearer let me leap on you
Then kick the earth and scream in the face of heaven
stir up the dust and fill the world with clatter
and gallop gallop and gallop and gallop
climb the mountain and ford the streams
race the wind and birds and light itself
and even the vows of lovers.
Let's gallop wherever we choose
Let's never stop even when the light turns red
Let's damn directions and gallop
I'll spur your flanks and gallop and gallop and gallop.

Don't loiter in pastures soft with hay
sweeter than sugar in your mouth
Don't pause with me
in festivals of sickness
or in the still swamp of senility
where bodies are corpses
where childhood is not a dream of innocence
but just a prison for the simple-minded
where eccentricity is a disease
exile—humiliation,
and madness, deviance.

Listen, I wouldn't have loved you
and chosen you to ride
had it been you and only you in the stables.
I wouldn't have loved you
if I'd been rotting in a swamp
and hated the universe without daring to spit
on everybody in it
or had waited with empty eyes
in an emptier existence
for an emptiness that you would bring me.
You wouldn't have been my mount
if I hadn't passed a thousand stables
packed with horse after horse after horse—
sorrels, palaminos, chestnuts, blacks
thoroughbreds and halfbreeds
racehorses and ploughhorses
pampered or overloaded
well-groomed or not
if I hadn't rejected them all
and yearned for you
saying You are the one I love You and you alone.

So come nearer nearer
The sentence is clear
I'm nailed to the wall of my prison
Come nearer
I'd rather die than wait to die
Slow time bites like a whip

Come nearer You are the one I want Just you
You alone are my escape, my home, my Eden.
Come nearer
my help, my guide, my savior
my midwife
my mother
Come nearer please

I don't know your name
your parents or your country
(who cares about the kind of clay that is a statue
and who would send the beloved's bones to the laboratory?)
It's quite enough that you are beautiful
that your body is my “open sesame”
to life itself.
Tonight I must make a journey
that will break my father's heart and gladden me
like a journey that broke my heart and gladdened him.

Carry me now and gallop.

Don't pause with me
beside the spring where you always drink
where I promised to meet you.
Don't stop with me
in the fields of blood
where life is paid for
by a medal, a leader's speech, a headline.
Don't ride through fields
where hate's perfume is fouled
with the stink of heroism and braggadocio and duty
where hate is saved for enemies alone.
Fields of my blood
I don't patrol you I have no comrades here
Fields of my blood
Like guzzling mouths that are always thirsty
for the frozen blood of old men
the blood of young girls that blooms in their cheeks
before the long monotony
the blood of warriors
the blood of healers
the rich blood of healers
the stained blood of syphilitics
the blood of friends and neighbors
the blood of my wife
with a child in her arms
and another she labors to bear.

Fields of my blood
Gardens fertilized with hatred
with utter, total hatred
for those there and those here
those I've seen and those I haven't
with hatred
for you, and you and you, and even for me

Gallop with me
Fly without wings beyond the horizon
Flick at space and the world with your mane
Flick the sun
Drive it off as if it were a tick
glued onto your flanks.

I won't ask
where your hooves strike
where the road goes where you spend the night.
I'm satisfied to ride you to be riding you
playing with your hair
hearing you
and see the world bow low and disappear
before you as you gallop.

Don't swerve with me
into some Bacchanalian garden
where the stars are like so many eyes
where songs are the hisses of snakes
where flowers are only paper and ribbon
their colors mingled—
red and white and yellow—
the colors of blood and sperm and pus.

Don't take me
to a garden crowded
with circling dancers
whose arms and breasts mummified centuries ago
seem mounted on bodies
that move them like machines
They jabber prayers
in foreign tongues
to an unknown goddess.

They dance and cavort
machine with machine
They carry out their secret rites.
They mate until their climax sunders them
like a shedding of innocence
a baptism of sin and knowledge
a bond making the two one
and the one nothing …

But with you a sweet song
rises and rises when you are near me
You are the queen that ends all festivals and rites
Strongly beneath me
you gallop.

So gallop with me
my new Shahrazad …
You who swallow every night
a new Shahriyar
gallop with me
and I'll gallop with you.
I breathe in what you breathe out.
I touch my feet to yours.
I'll pant with you
until we climb and search and then descend
the last horizon.

Gallop with me.
Falling, let's fall as lovers fall,
together.
Let's move in tandem
to the song we hear as one,
you beneath me,
I above.

Gallop with me.
The race is short,
and there is one goal for both of us.
Leap the last stream with me,
and when the last exhaustion topples you,
I'll fall beside you,
spent, transformed and still.