Zebra and Parachute

            after Christopher Wood 

A zebra in a yard before a factory
Noses at the shade. You could say he 

Is camouflaged. Near to those ungrazed plants
In the raised bed, he remains in balance

With those chimneys. A man drops through the sky.
Black-grey. Grey-white. I don’t think he will die,

Not because he has a parachute 
(Red and yellow, it could blaze a suit

For Harlequin), but because he looks quite dead.
May I add, the last words to be said

By Christopher Wood were to Samuel Smailes 
Of Smiths at Salisbury Station. A mind fails.

There is no sense in words striping a book.
A young man jumps. A train arrives. We look.

Likenesses

The view inside the hedge is so much fretwork:
Fretwork and fretwork— everything is detail,
Each ridge and blemish of the wood’s grey skin;
To journey anywhere is to have been
Where I have been, to grasp some part to fail
To understand the whole. I could go beserk

In the tight tangle of this long wide wood,
Like a man at moonlight who is lost
To what is human, like a moonlight man
Who is lost to looking, like the way one can
See branches in stark blanchings of the frost
That branch out like human veins, understood

By what they are and aren’t, the moon the man
With his whey face. In here all is pencil,
Until beyond its margin one bursts through
To a painted world, as if a sketch were true,
As if a graphite trace were its own stencil,
As if that pelt of leaves were how one can

Discover what is inside and what out,
Where out is now a January hedge
To a front garden touching a sky
Whose cupola of blue must by and by
Become a fading roof whose outer edge
Now is the edge of space, where all about

Suns like our sun seem small and constellated
In branchings after branchings that must reach
To where they touch on nothing but a margin,
While in here I trace small points of origin
Conjoined by lines which echo each to each,
A drawn out world where all worlds are related.