[Curtis Gale Weeks]

(Here's one for Curtis. This poem tells us quite a few things...and none of them likely to be true!)
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Here's one that tells us many things, speaks w/ hyperbole, but is much, much better; it's relating something else without telling us, however: something beyond the apparent telling.

<u>Ixion at Mud</u>

I have succumbed to the smell of sweating
mud thwacked by hooves and fresh-sawn
lumber oozing pine sap, yellowing alfalfa

bricks, a snap, a whinny, and a mallard’s
whack. I want to stand in the pen now,
barefoot in the steaming mud; among

the foals I want to buck. I know that clay
will pack and harden between my soft
winter-toes. In the mud, I’ll make amends

for the many mistakes I’ve made this year:
wearing my elbows red, bleating my knotty
stomach at the absent green—cramped—

my heart turned to liver, my heart turned to spleen.
For months, the brittle moth wings in my throat
have been swallowed, crushed or clipped.

I must be leaving for the mud now, sidling
up to the pent mares in the open where they
neigh. I will mount white-bellied Hylonome,

and she will bear our children; they will be
centaurs; not one will ever know the feel
of mud on soft soles, but four hooves

caked with piss-clay and sullied fetlock tufts,
the heft of horse, the mind of man. Burdened by
two livers, they will be too bilious, but also by

two hearts, too good. I will keep their quivers clean
and soap their bellies until they act like men,
and then I will free them from the pen.


--Evan Eisman

(Evan, if you're about: I hope you don't mind my using yours as an example...)