Like white horses,
bright as a morning sky,
the gods we make up
out of whole cloth,
their souls, their essence,
in our chaste imaginations
seem to fly forever
through our prosaic nights and days,
then fade into the realm
of Lethe and stillness
before the brimming fullness
of mystic lake and eye;
through the process of corruption
we see the potent universe
brought down,
become hollow and desolate,
our dry earth hard
without strength,
barren of life, of hope.
Watching on the river bank
we become listless;
in March the moving water
dull without undulation;
the bloom, the leaves to come
remote as the moon.
A sudden movement,
a fleeting limb white
against the lifeless trees;
spring and who returns?
New green groves grow in,
the meadows hearken;
spring, generous eater, destroys
the dead landscape of winter
and limb by limb
the white horses
to the flutes of
the wild half-beast
goat-legged chorus
celebrate sweet Flora;
stripped of disguise,
the white horses,
god by god,
pass endlessly in solemn order.
This scene, this procession
is what we made them for,
those gods,
careless and serene,
endlessly passing
between being and non-being;
endlessly changing
the scheme of things,
the resolution
of creation and disorder.
