Riding with Keats
                               

He is so light that his patient horse
might carry him for a thousand years,
this little man whose hand
clutches quietly at the reins.
When we ride each morning
along the Tiber, I see
the ardor of his bowed face
flash over the dark water.
I watch his eyes that watch nothing
glow and deepen with
the slow immensity of words,
I feel his whole body grow
into another language,
the sweet and awkward syllables
of its solitude.

Our horses' nostrils quiver
with each quick breath of rising wind
as if they smelled the coming snow.

But what will come with the snow?

The storm of a thousand hooves
plunging across the piazza,
the ghostly hailstones chiming
in a dazzle of blue crystal
under our stunned feet,
the sudden hush of deep drifts
closing endlessly over the loneliness
of our long ride together
through this hardbreathing silence.