Tuesday, April 26, 2011

both sides of the window

a leafy trellis with roses carl spitzweg



naked apples, wooly-coated peaches
swelled on the garden's wall. unbounded
odour of windless, spice-bearing trees
surrounded my lying in sacred turf,
made dense the guarded air - the forest of trees
buoyed up therein like weeds in ocean
lived without motion. i was the pearl,
mother-of-pearl my bower. milk-white the cirrhus
streaked the blue egg-shell of the distant sky,
early and distant, over the spicy forest;
wise was the fangless serpent, drowsy.
all this, indeed, I do not remember.
i remember the remembering, when first waking
i heard the golden gates behind me
fall to, shut fast. on the flinty road,
black-frosty, blown on with an eastern wind,
i found my feet. forth on journey,
gathering thin garment over aching bones,
i went. i wander still. but the world is round.

c.s. lewis, poems

12 comments:

OceanoAzul.Sonhos said...

steven, what mystical trip of color and smell that surrounds our soul.
oa.s

steven said...

hello oa.s, the senses are signposts. beneath the beautiful and rich surface of our experiencing of them are even greater riches. steven

Jo said...

"...but still the world is round."

Round and ripe and full of wonder and goodness and achingly beautiful warm, sun-dappled walls with cool, fresh green foliage on their never-ending ascent to the sky.
___________

I never could grasp C.S. lewis' depth of meaning (this one seems to be a metaphor for birth?), but I love the painting and the slant of light you add to his poem.

Reya Mellicker said...

The new banner is truly gorgeous! And the words today, and the image. Ahhhhh

Ruth said...

The earth is round as we wander, looking for the remembering, the golden inside, that we had once and forgot.

Friko said...

am glad you honour the poets of your past.
C.S. Lewis is one I read too.

steven said...

friko - there are so many writers to be learned about and then re-presented somewhere in the world. i am barely skimming the surface but i am really just beginning . . . again. steven

steven said...

hi ruth - there's so much to remember. i seemed to have missed a lot for all the good and hard distractions of life flooded through and demanded their time and space but as i return little by little to the essential golden inside which is indistinguishable from the form of the world beneath this i see and hear and feel much of what i remembered once long ago. steven

steven said...

reya - i love the light in mid-spring for its clear lusciousness and the special clarity that all newness brings to the air of experiencing. steven

Rachel Fenton said...

No disputing the world is round - how are we supposed to get to the bottom of the thing we can't even reach the end of!?
I think a few moments leaning at that window frame would give a view of where to begin at least.

steven said...

jo i'm not good at opening out poems and offering ripe and rich intuitions grounded in scholarly repartee but i did like the soft fingers of this poem as they reached out and across the constraints of time to speak so gently of the journey that affords beauty and hardship and essential goodness to all who choose to undertake it. steven

steven said...

hey rachel! i've read your writing. you know how to get beneath the surface of any object - spherical, oblong - it doesn't matter. there are riches pointed to by the signposts that hover on the surface. the first step is looking out of the window of your experiencing. but you're so far beyond that already! steven