An Old Scat Full of Red Fur
How old is the song called The Wars Are Not Over?
Black letter, white letter, flimsy sheets
‘And yet you may see by them how the wind sits
Which you may not do by tossing up a stone’
Climbers indulging in rock talk
‘Smart money’s on that cloud to freeze our tits off’
Bats swallows bats swallows — no moment unguarded
As the guy on the radio said last night,
‘Let’s have The Pain in My Heart, and then we’ll have the rest of it’
Log clawed open by a black bear
Human footprint in sand called Sand
(Walked with their feet, warred with their arms)
And here at the edge of the first snowfield
‘Devices of concatenation’
Bar the way weeping and weeping their voices rise
Which means wet socks, a willow thicket
Its branches all entangled with the view
‘Show the camel’s hair and the colour in it’
A ‘War South of the Great Wall’
A white ‘strangely delicious’
By which I mean ‘sparrow song’
By which I mean ‘expression of facts’
And ‘the most tender distances of sky’
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