Dry waterfall
that eventually, almost,
the skull resembled—
And then the skull was just
a skull.
The heart—
at last nothing
but a muscle moving,
not at all the talisman you’d imagined:
how if only you could touch it—how
everything, everything might
yet be different
if you did . . .
Is this
perfection,
or the cost of it?
If the mind seems
increasingly a landscape
where brush and desert, dry
prairie, and chaparral
coincide,
is this that landscape,
or the abandoned
set, finally, for one of those movies
that take place there: sudden
sandstorm, each man
immediately dismounting, each blinding,
with whatever cloth available,
his horse’s eyes . . .
That much, still,
is true, isn’t it?—the horse
comes first? then you do?