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.
Copyright © Dort James | Year Posted 2011
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