AN EVENING, SITTING

 "He knows that all paths are impossible and thus he walks them calmly in the night.”  Federico Garcia Lorca on ‘the poet’

 

The smell of books in a public library contains infinities, these well ordered shelves call my name in a seductive whispering of words within words within houses of secrets.

That feeling returns unbidden when aloneness and a moody half-dark basement collude to bring me somewhere strange yet also almost known like a home from another life.

Wind rustles tree leaves outside my upstairs window in a chilled November night. The street outside is quiet and waits like a maiden emptied for her meandering man.

Where is fertility to be found asked the barren merchant? Not in crumpled money nor in tomorrow’s schoolbook promise. We must look lightly into scary darkness, sense the moist breath of foreign artists there. See first for ourselves, then others shall be included surely.

They speak in unknown colors, curved sounds and barely ascending fragrances. Listen with your secret ears.  Skin can sense the touch of invisibilities before summer’s tallest corn is tasted by hillside’s unshorn sheep who linger on and on past the softest dusk.

Can you allow the world to languish, to linger in such perfect slowness? Perhaps not knowing is the clearest path to understanding….’Perhaps’ may be the finest word. Perhaps.