Blameless as daylight I stood looking
At a field of horses, necks bent, manes blown, (flowing manes)
Tails streaming against the Green Backdrop (Fluttering tails in front of the green plane tree backdrop)
of Sycamores. Sun was striking
White chapel pinnacles over the roofs, (white church battlements over the roofs)
Holding the horses, the clouds, the leaves
Steadily rooted though they were all flowing
Away to the left like reeds in a sea, (like reeds in the water bent to the left)
When the splinter flew in and stuck my eye,
Needling it dark. Then I was seeing
A melding of shapes in a hot rain: (Color shapes)
Horses warped on the altering green, (distorted horses)
Outlandish as double-humped camels or unicorns, (Strange like a camel or a unicorn)
Grazing at the margins of a bad monochrome,
Beasts of oasis, a better time.
Abrading my lid, the small grain burns: (If I rub my eyelid, little Gran burns)
Red cinder around which I myself,
Horses, planets and spires revolve. (Horses, Planets and turrets rotate)
Neither tears nor the easing flush (Neither tears nor eyebaths can scare away the grain)
Of eyebaths can uneat the speck:
It sticks, and it has stuck a week.
I wear the present itch for flesh,
Blind to what will be and what was.
I dream that I am Oedipus.
What I want back is what I was
Before the bed, before the knife,
Before the brooch-pin and the salve (Before the brooch pin, the ointment harnessed me)
Fixed me in this paranthesis;
Horses, fluent in the wind, (Horses, flowing in the wind)
a place, a time gone out of mind. (a place, a time passed.)