Centaur on the Beach

His hooves are almost hidden by the sand,
so deeply, firmly they are set in it,
gnawing into the self-correcting writ
spread by the frothy, ever-moving hand.
The specks of sand, like freshly fallen dew,
turn his hazel fur into a lambent meadow,
unfolding outwards, exhaling dense, disturbing
puff of the flesh, the smell of salivating tongue.

Like wolves continuously looking
through the rusted bars of their hell,
with longing hardly visible, so pale
their eyes, so livid their tongues still licking
the air outside the cage, to get the sense
of the more and more unreal recompense,

so your eyes, too, are probing the vast death
spread like a razor-blade, in front of you
they try to be immovable, to cue
the stagnant trites one after another, but the dearth
of motion that can be meaningful is absent,
replaced by the taste of salt, by the scent

of disintegrating algae, of the infant hammerhead,
whose cut off head is waiting for the gulls.
You could have moved and noticed on the sand
the stamps of massive hooves resembling skulls,
but no, you no longer wish to move,
your measured pulse is streaming through each hoof,

though the cold sand, through the rock below,
through the layers of the varied forms with no
pith, it reaches to the planet's pulp, its bone, its molten
marrow boiling, bursting out, brimming, holding on
its own tremendous weight, its indecisiveness,
which is apparent less and less,

which cannot keep, cannot sustain itself – and
bursts into you ! bruises you, cries
within you like a wounded wolf, flaps like a broken hand,
falls out like no longer seeing eyes,
spirals through you into the flesh of the rising god,
kills him, goes higher - to destroy, derange
the luminaries, to raise itself like a breathing hedge

around everything that can define and hold,
heaving like the ocean filled with fluid gold,
exploding, screaming, soaring up and out,
your ears cannot hear it, for it is too loud,
your blood, no longer quelled by the vessels blue
and brittle, flies out, shrieking like a mad curlew,

hit by a sudden gush of the rugged air,
you are heading outwards, you are everywhere,
you are the crowd, the immense assembly of images
stamped on the grimacing mien of toothless ages,
rushing like a flock of scared starlings, a gush of leaves -
and scattering, all of a sudden, within the vocalise

of the autumnal atmosphere. You nod your head,
taking in a drawn-out breath of heavy brine.
What died in front of me will be forever mine.
My ocean and my death are still my wine and bread.
I have grown up a deity, a thought without end,
a faulty idol rooted in the sand.

Вланес, 2006

Сертификат Поэзия.ру: серия 790 № 47151 от 03.09.2006

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