Plato's Ghost

Perhaps:

there are none other than these phantoms of the mind
or ghosts that idly toss horse
shoes and whittle buffalo from soap stone --
ghosts that wander on uninhabited grass, hands folding --
ghosts with heels on the soft and solitary paths
outside the city.

And this said on to this and the
ideas live on.
Many fathers, many mothers
and they were sired, too
and some are speaking still and we catch a hint of their eyes or lips
in a certain light.

The sound of traveller's hooves is the sound of castanets is the sound of rain.
You will not need that tunic here.

And when you set your robes aside
to feel June sunlight,
the cool wind has one pleasure
and the warm wind another.

In far reaches,
our ideas are mirrored in nebulae shaped like
common animals: dogs,
dragonflies, horse
shoe crabs, a horse
head that echoes
Troy.
A horse of toxic
dust and red fire,
flaring from nostrils one-hundred
years wide.
The pillars of creation.
Roseatte pelicans plunging into dawn seas.
Light pulled down into the sea,
light sinking, fading, and lost
into unreflected waves.

But the ideas of us. Who were we?
What comes to us over time in
answer to our questions and our
memories -- sun and sky, the
soil, circles of lights amid circles of horizons and eyes that look at moons
waned and waxed and
pearls of sand, twice dried
riverbeds and
seedlings, triumphantly breaking the peak
of the brown earth.
These rings and water accreting,
fleshing out the lines
of the dead.