Two Poems
Yvette Thomas

The New Socratic

I get up early to go shadow-reading, shadow-naming. I once aspired to the noiseless heavens, but now I come from below mantle, rock, seawater, air. I was ill-named once, then corrected myself. I was blinded so I returned. I see my book in the hands of the illiterate. O, hoi polloi, o plenum. Now I go to be alone. My doll is three-legged, a telescope.



Ur_

The poet frames her poem in the history of horses, after the apocryphal horse-god, and titles it horse lover, or maybe fucker. Then she is free to say she is what came from the ground after a particularly strong rain. Or lack of rain. That is now under the hooves of God.

What are you before you are anyone. Five chimes in the still air. A handful of water from the lake. How melodious. How seamless. Now Phillipa has a meaning.

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