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Sport 37: Winter 2009

Bonsense

page 67

Bonsense

for Heather Tone

Grass kingdom,
higher than headwise, horsewise.
A tree looks down on you from the roadside.

Paddock peopled with tiny horses,
a stirrup, leg-up, leg over,
more tiny size, more
proliferation of tinyness.

Un-joy, a kind of blank seriousness—
it doesn't live among the horses.

You are a long way away, in a library.
You say, if your small library were a body,
poetry would be the head and torso,
fiction a limb, reference a limb.

From the chest of your books,
you enjoin belief
in outposts of miniature sense or nonsense,
or going further, antonym, bonsense
the elaborate folly of the heart and brain,
built curlicued, baroque.

What bonsense is this, a tiny horse, a tiny library?
The great iced cake of relationships,
the ornamental pony of compassion,
the perennial shout (Shout) of shared exclamation.