In a February Way

Can it be done then? Can you still imagine a better when the sky is gray and the soul feels a hollow, when nature and being conspire together to a stillness than is not replete with life but echoes of the inevitable silence? But there then. In asking the question, the something in the soul that is not gone, not given up remembers this same sky in a different time and a different place and the lingering bouquet of a memory of being that was seeing in the life progression a hope that is in itself an evidence of better.

Where is my Hobbit pony, my wardrobe door, my mutant power? It cannot be that they resolve into a stuff reserved for children. “When I became a man, I put away childish things”? So scornful of delight, we near declare it part of the teeming crowd of principalities and powers and rules of the darkness. And, oh, my archaic sensibility, seeing in vanish’d styles of prose the fix’d path to peace. Spring up, oh well, within my soul, spring up and bring not proof but hope never abating. Even the February light is conceived betwixt sunlight and water, which makes the plants of summer ripen and bloom. There is yet mystery. There are still places on the map that read not, “unknown,” but, in full honesty, “here there be monsters.”

And we strain to believe that like the trees, the dead are not dead but merely asleep. The cracked visage of the sky, entangled with barren limbs holds promise of adventure and delight. The gentler aspect of the soul sets the body to walking in the woods, quiet of all but the wind and the trunks that creak in its passing, and therein finds its own story embedded in the frozen ears of lichen. You listen as Bottom the weaver with your eyes to the dream unfolding in wakefulness mistaken for slumber. And love, even love, is then possible to the ass-headed man. That it is gone with the waking dew does not vanish its being in your memory. And memory slides into the moment and the moment fills with breath, and the bones, even those hollow bones, begin to move. Even from fear we rest, awoken. And this thinking, thinking, thinking flesh must move, move, move to find itself gentle for sleep to rise from sleep and feel the round fullness of life indwelling in life.