The Wellspring

I have a source, still: a singular supply, once hidden to me -- not lost, but unremarked; yet as I grew in skin and mind one day I found its secret space. When I was young the well was always in a dark country where only I could pass, and then as tourist only; and as I advanced in bone and soul the thunderheads of that nation's skies thinned out to silver, bronze, and blue. And my mine became a bower, peopled with tamed companies of wild flowers, with the coiled promise of spring always in their throats; and my well was now a refuge, where I ran and wrote and respirated, and the waters tasted fine and free but cold as -- because it was a friendless fountainhead, struck solitary from the grassfed soil, the moss starved stone. And I became cunning, jealous of my well, and boasted of its native genius; and walked on stilts, naive, and hopscotched into gluttony and sloth; and though I drank alone my thirst was never slaked by its resource. But as I grew in head and head I sipped, I supped, I watered myself from its deep draught: my eyes eloped, my ears divorced -- the marriage of my senses fled; my reason has itself replaced and preyed upon by rats of idiocy, by cockroaches of desire. And always is my well a font and moat alike my ticket out: my goal; my gaol.