I'm going to bed, and I just wanted to leave you with the poem I just read. I've read it before and I forgot how good Collins can be, when he isn't just being cute. I don't know what it is, but I'm always reading poems about the absence of God. This one is no exception.
He crafts his poems well, from the gentle, subtle enjambment in the first few stanzas, to the slow dissolving of punctuation in the last. This poem is an homage to the divinity of creating. He is, after all, the artist, hanging this heavy (read: profound) creation over us that we may gaze upon its visage... Or something.
There's something almost Godly in reading things which question His existence. As if I'm reminded that, though he is gone now--or though I can not feel him now--he once was. As if, like Stephen Dunn wrote in Salvation:
The small prayers I devised
had in them the hard sounds
of split and frost.
In the beaconless dark
I wanted them to speak
as if it made sense to speak
to what isn't there.
I wanted them to startle
by how little they asked.
Okay, enough about me. Here's the Collins:
Nine Horses
For my birthday,
my wife gave me nine horse heads,
ghostly photographs on squares of black marble,
nine squares set in one large square,
a thing so heavy that the artist himself
volunteered to hang it
from a wood beam against a white stone wall.
Pale heads of horses in profile
as if a flashcube had caught them walking in the night.
Pale hose heads
that overlook my reading chair,
the eyes so hollow they must be weeping,
the mouths so agape they could be dead--
the photographer standing over them
on a floor of straw, his black car parked by the stable door.
Nine white horses,
or one horse the camera has multiplied by nine.
It hardly matters, such sadness is gathered here
in their long white faces
so far from the pasture and the cube of sugar--
the face of St. Bartholomew, the face of St. Agnes.
Odd team of horses,
pulling nothing,
look down on these daily proceedings.
Look down upon this table and these glasses,
the furled napkins,
the evening wedding of the knife and fork.
Look down like a nine-headed god
and give us a sign of your displeasure
or your gentle forbearance
so that we may rejoice in the error of our ways.
Look down on this ring
of candles flickering under your pale heads.
Let your suffering eyes
and your anonymous deaths
be the bridle that keeps us from straying from each other
be the cinch that fastens us to the belly of each day
as it gallops away, hooves sparking into the night.
I guess if I can't pray to God, I'll revel in words, numinous words: the fragile raft that floats atop our unreachable world.
I think I need to just shut up and go to bed.
'night.
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