The Horse and other works by Anselm Hollo

Born in Helsinki, Anselm Hollo has been writing and teaching across the globe, with stays in Germany, Austria, London, New York, San Francisco, Iowa City, and Sweet Briar, Virginia. Since 1985 he has made his home in Boulder, Colorado where he teaches at Naropa University. An award-winning translator of German, French, and Finnish literature, he received a 2004 Harold Morton Landon Translation Award from the Academy of American Poets. His collection of poetry Notes on the Possibilities and Attractions of Existence (Coffee House Press) received the San Francisco Poetry Center Award in 2001.

 

The Horse

is an animal
so is the human

the motor car is not an animal

to the human animal
it does feel like a horse

a horse that does not shit in the road
it shits in the air
breathed by both human and horse
with just possibly
more deleterious effacts

but we had fewer humans and horses
back then

 

75

it ain't the middle of life but I'm still
lost in the woods

 

Somewhere

between the cat and the tree
must be my country

and the finch
singing above us

about the world
that suffers

and yearns

 

Who Said I Could Do This?

half a century trying
still not sure why
I tie my shoelaces funny

 

"THERE IS ROOM IN THE ROOM THAT I ROOM IN"

said (I believe) Ted Berrigan

and there is room in the rooms that we room in

for work and works
of art

and of course myriad "objects"
needed and/or believed to be so

and talk and touch and look(s)

there is room for us
who may feel large sometimes
if not downright great

but also truly quite small
(as I told you one night)
     and lovable

 

Cathar Death Jazz

pretty feral he was when she took him in