Their ruffled reds and pinks
in continuous bloom,
their fringed petals
thriving in full sun—
are crinolines,
petticoats, and hoopskirts
from long-vanished balls
of whirling orbs,
spun of skin-tight embrace—
oh, how many undergarments,
how much of such excess,
turned so firmly upward
on the stalks’ tightened legs—
and we, breathless:
could we stand?
October is the month
when the living
honor their dead,
each trying to recall
another’s presence—
or long-buried past.
And it was then, in 2017,
that I myself passed
through two
very different
Bohemian towns,
set on opposite sides
of the land.
In Telč, the autumn
found me in a park
at sunrise,
lost in morning mist.
Then, in Chýše,
I walked through a park
much like the one
by the château
where Karel Čapek
once wrote and lived—
the sun already grazing
the evening-softened hills.
Yet in both places—
at two far reaches
of space and time—
I met a flock of children,
and I was struck:
they greeted me
as if they had known me
for a long while—
or longer still.
O how devoutly I cherish
such gestures of remembrance.
They speak of freedom—but freedom itself
in them is mute. And what do they know
of Rome and the Vatican, since they dress
Lady Liberty in a Roman matron’s gown?
And to whom does such a stern goddess—
an immortal feminine archetype—
meeting her pilgrim at the port,
as Bendis once did Socrates—
pass the twin light of her flaming torch,
if she be no abysmal Gorgon—
one who not only turns her men to swine,
but dissolves them into a loveless void?
Into that void of fatal soullessness
that casts the good and the beautiful
as a recessive dream—
a void that engulfs what one is
or was in ravenous extinction?
And in that gaping hollow, its hostages
are given over to infectious ugliness
that dubs nigredo its elixir and gold,
locking out the ailing rays of truth.
Unless one chooses to resist—
by mastering first the ancient art
of sitting quietly; for thus one learns
how to gather who one is—
and so unlearn not to resist,
nor be swept away by the motions
of the time’s unrelenting windmills
that lift—only to cast their prey
back into the world, coiled in their tail,
where love that once cleared the base
has somehow been forgotten—
though its scent still lingers
in the air like a rose’s breath
from a garden long since gone.
So perhaps an old Sufi saying
may yet offer a slender consolation:
“At every point there are two ways—
the way of strength and the way of weakness.”
And this is the geometry we find on Earth—
though to choose otherwise than the many
marks one an outcast, a pariah,
one who offends against “the holy.”
Yet the soul is the path of all paths,
the song of all songs, and love
of all loves—the golden thread,
the only one leading from the labyrinth,
unknotting all nights and knots,
yet binding the two of us in a filament,
in a great lacing that crisscrosses
lives and deaths.
But how many souls, and how many loves,
would choose that long, beautiful path—
beholden to measure as revelation
in the adoration of the soul’s fresh divine bloom?
