In the Pines

I left in the night with the carriage of antlers. 

The horses were tired, the riders were dead

The pines in their shiver forgot it was summer,  

And every spine withered without any bend.  

I'm waiting for you in the midst of the summer,  

In the midst of the winter—how strange is this story.

Don’t scream in the woods, lest the noise make you stammer,  

But the forest seems dead, so why should you worry?

I'll send you some poems in blistering verses.  

The sea will embrace them like bottles afloat—  

Like torsos of gods and their carnival thyrses,  

Like splashing wet corpses, like telephone boats.  

My suit is of horns now; I'm almost a stag.  

I'm riding away on hundreds of hooves,  

Whilst songs of the forest flap tatters and rags  

Of reverent toadstools and kings of the woods.  

My name I just lost; it was gone by the morning,  

And now ’tis a gale and a tempest which looms,  

And frosty its ghost will become without warning,  

For I am the face on that freshest of tombs.

And so this is all, I've departed at last.

The ghost of the carriage grins mute from the past!