THE ROOF OF THE WORLD
Another celebration of the magical potential of children (in this case, my nephew). What is it that we adults do, to squash them flat?
THE ROOF OF THE WORLD belongs to the following groups:
All Things Poetic, Artistic, PhilosophicalThere you are, as I was at your age,
A solitary child in your teeming realm
Far from the shimmering torpor that I see – this
Province of flowers, in radiant mourning.
For you invisible choirs hold their breath:
They crowd, in secret awe, between the
Crack electric wires of this late-summer
Garden. For sharp as saws, taut as a
Tendon ready to snap, its dried and shrinking
Stems. Rhythms of anemones, ragged hollyhocks,
The flame-haired helenium,
Attuned, for you, to music of another plane,
Where newness comes, ripe and bright.
I saw you, with blooms high above your head,
Testing yourself in fresh and unknown space:
Crashing, with your toes, a wake in gravel seas
- As I did, at your age;
Leaping the boulders of your
Grandma’s rockery – islands and isthmuses,
That float now on the white mists of an evening,
Where tattered mariner-moths, fugitives
In umbral velvet, scud and skim:
Where greenbottles, bloated and dissolute,
Lay fulsome in their dying dream.
You told me, you were jumping over the top
Of the world – the same phrase that I used
When I was eight. Little nephew: don’t become a
Slave within the cell of your perception, as I did;
Be like the panther that bounds, unfettered,
Unbound, though grievously captive:
Be our Prometheus, unafraid of necessary loneliness,
Bringing fire to the dwindling compass of our cage;
Seeing for the first time…where I, instead,
Watch stagnant, involuted forms
Preludes to a redundant nocturne –
Profuse and blowsy, a dusted reliquary –
Inert as adult thinking.
August 2001 – For James
“Who so must be a man, must be a nonconformist” – Ralph Waldo Emerson
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