In the Pines

I left in the night with the carriage of antlers. 

The drivers and riders are suitably dead,  

And pine trees now rest in the midst of the summer,  

And every spine shivers without any end.  

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, for the stir makes you stammer,  

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

I'll send you some pictures in colorful shades.  

The sea will embrace them like bottles afloat—  

Like stories of eld or kitschy charades,  

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.