Descending into irony, and close up topics like spangled sweaters, is a signal to go deeper and look broader across the enormity of this horizon; delving and thinking with the deep and the thoughtful, like Proust, Rilke, Rumi, O’Donahue, where one simple line can hold the weight and the beauty of the heaviest fruit and return for you to feast upon time after time, long after the season has died and the trees are bare.
And I am fearful of the way I skim and skip across the water using the rhythm of the stones to carry all sound, delighting with a flick of the wrist and the familiar use of childish ways, but taking us back to where we’ve already been and staying on top to avoid the stilt and the stir, to avoid losing my way in these mired, muddied depths.
Am I here to herald simple words that adhere to bumpers and jingles; is the whole of my truth already sung? Or is it that I’d rather be loved than known? The words that come nimbly and quickly jump over candlesticks without touching the flame, curled in nurseries calling goodnight to the moon. They grew in a tree in Brooklyn, in the back of a wardrobe, in a secret garden; but the ones I long to speak stay silent at 20,000 leagues, in the belly of the whale, in distant moors and cobbled, shadowed streets.
And what use, this pursuit of the ordinary? If I can’t make lovely a simple branch, or unbury the lost from the floor of the sea, what use am I? Oh the places you’ll go, when compared to a summer’s day; Oh red fish, blue fish is this winter of my discontent! Until I know my voice, my words are neither here nor there, or anywhere, close to the depths beneath me.
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