Levertov - Sands of the Well

Glitter of grey oarstrokes over the waveless, dark, secretive water. A boat is moving toward me slowly, but who is rowing and what it brings I cant yet see. I spent the entire night leading a blind man through an immense museum so that (by internal bridges, or tunnels? somehow!) he could avoid the streets, the most dangerous avenues, all the swift chaotic traffic I persuaded him to allow my guidance, through to the other distant doors, though once inside, labyrinthine corridors, steps, jutting chests and chairs and stone arches bewildered him as I named them at each swerve, and were hard for me to manoeuver him around and between. As he could perceive nothing, I too saw only the obstacles, the objects with sharp corners; not one painting, not one carved credenza or limestone martyr. We did at last emerge, however, into that part of the city he had been headed for when I took over; he raised his hat in farewell, and went on, uphill, tapping his stick. You can live for years next door to a big pinetree, honored to have so venerable a neighbor, even when it sheds needles all over your flowers or wakes you, dropping big cones onto your deck at still of night. You can live for years next door to a big pinetree, honored to have so venerable a neighbor, even when it sheds needles all over your flowers or wakes you, dropping big cones onto your deck at still of night.

Only when, before dawn one year at the vernal equinox, the wind rises and rises, raising images of cockleshell boats tossed among huge advancing walls of waves, do you become aware that always, under respect, under your faith in the pinetrees beauty, there lies the fear it will crash some day down on your house, on you in your bed, on the fragility of the safe dailiness you have almost grown used to.

A sunset of such aqueous hints, subdued opaline gleamings, so much grey among its wan folds, fading tangerine roses; and in a rosetreenot a rosetree, a young tree of some other species which has become the noble support, patient, perhaps eager, of a capricious Gloire de Dijon in this green symbiosis of elder and wildening rose, the evening wind is pulsing, and the sound nearby of a saxophone, slowly wistful without being strictly sad. For the first time, the certainty of return to this imprinted scene, unchanging but for the height of green thicket, rising year by year beyond the cobwebbed windowpanes, can not be assumed. My tree had a secret wound. Not lethal. And it was young.

But one withered branch hung down.

When distant oceans big V of silver reaches straight up, rearing between the hills that hold it, dont you feel you could go and go swift as hurricane till you flung yourself at its wall, its blue wall of spider silver, and passed like Alice into the blind mirror? The very act of lightingthe candle is prayer.Bro. David Steindl-Rast Just to light the candle, just to draw the breath of a sigh towards the match, is an act? A prayer? Can it bridge the gulf between our sense of being node, synapse, locus of hidden counsels and the multitudinous force of world? Some days, some moments shiver in extreme fragility. A trembling brittleness of oak and iron. Splinterings, glassy shatterings, threaten. Evaporations of granite.

These are the danger moments: different from fear of what we do, have done, may do. Different from apprehension of mortality, the closing cadence of lived phrases, a continuum. These are outside the pattern. Youve heard the way infant and ancient sleepers stop sometimes between one breath and the next? You know the terror of watching them. Its like that. As if the world were a thought God was thinking and then not thinking.

Divine attention turned away. Will breath and thought resume? They do, for now.

In the night foundations crumble. Gods image was contrived of beaten alloy. A thin clatter as it tumbles from its niche. Parts of your body ache, each separate, ominous, linked only by emplacement within a worn skin.

Convictions wheel and scatter, white birds affrighted. In time you sleep. But wake to the same sensation: adrift mid-ocean, frayed mooring ropes trailing behind you, swirling. Yet when you open unwilling eyes, you see the day is sunlit. You walk down to the real shore. Over the city, a scum of brown.

But it is quiet among the trees, grass strewn with first-fallen leaves, a sheen of dew. The past night remains with you, but your attention is drawn away from it to taste the autumn light, falling into your empty hands.

In each mind, even the most candid, there are forests, where needled haze overshadows the slippery duff and patches of snow long-frozen, or else where mangroves, proliferant, vine-entwisted, loom over warm mud that slowly bubbles. In these forests there live certain events, shards of memory, scraps of once-heard lore, intimations once familiarsome painful, shameful, some drably or laughably inconsequent, others thoughts that the thinker could never hold fast and begin to tell. And somea fewthat are noble, tender, and so complete in themselves, they had no need of saying. There they dwell, no sky above them, resting like dragonflies on the dense air, or nested on inaccessible twigs.

It is right that there are these secrets (even the weightless ones have perhaps some part to play in the unperceiveable whole) and these forests; privacies and the deep terrain to receive them. Right that they rise at times into our ken, and are acknowledged.

Rain and the dark. The owl, terror of those he must hunt, flies back and forth, hungry. Darkly, solemnly, softly, over and over, he makes known his presence, his call a falling of mournful notes, his tone much like the doves. To tell the truth, I believe I could be happy doing nothing but reading old diaries morning to night.

Silk and muslin brush my hands like moths passing by, the dancers go up and down the room, no one has learned the Valse as yet, fiddle and flute and fortepiano return to the older rhythms. Birth and death, the fortunes of war, fear and relief from fear compel attention, yet theyre veiled in the mild Septembery haze of timeblessedly present, blessedly long gone by. Aware of the shame I ought to feeldefecting so willingly from my own century I stroll calmly through candlelit rooms and down to the quay, to board a waiting vessel that sails with the tide into the finest clear nightpossible, the Comet more beautifulthan anything V ever saw,and the noise of the herrings,which passed usin immense shoals, glitteringin the Sea, like fire

Small intimations of destiny wove a hammock about me out of fine wiry fibers, a steel gossamer swaying calmly in chaos. What I needed was to examine it inch by inch, discover it true or false, shelter or prison. Instead, I lay low, evasive, imagining mortal weariness that its not yet time for. When the world comes to you muffled as through a glassdarklyjubilance, anguish, declined into faded postcardsremember how, seventeen, you said you no longer felt or saw with the old intensity, and knew that the flamelight would not rekindle; and how Bet scoffed and refused to believe you.