i
How can I cross the sea if I have no boat?
How indeed! – a voice replies – how indeed!
So I dance for a week and the stars dance with me, so does the sun, and the moon, but it is not enough.
After a week I sit down to rest. While resting I fall asleep. As I sleep a dream comes to me. In that dream I cross the sea first as a boat, then as a bird, then a great fish. Three times I cross the sea, and each time it fills me with boundless joy, for I grow in strength and power, I move beautifully o’er the sea, but it isn’t enough.
What more could you want? – asks the voice of dream.
I want to wake and do it all again. Can it be? Can you teach me how to do so?
And thus I find myself awake, still longing to cross the sea, still yearning for poetry in motion, for motion in poetry, and a song comes to me, a song that I sing wholeheartedly, with all my soul, with J – O – Y, to my heart’s content, and singing lustily I feel the dream descend like a bird from the sky, down, down into the tree of my me, the tree of my uncompleted story, and lo, the song complete, the fabric of that dream stretches itself out like a sail on the mast of that tree, and lo, the mast and the sail move me, move the boat that hitherto I failed to see – now seen, as now it sails across the sea, as happily, I hold the helm and ride the waves and count fish leaping o’er the deck as if they had wings, seventeen in all, leaping lustily.
And do you arrive at the land across the sea?
Do I make landfall in one day? Or do I sing again and bring the bird and the fish that I dreamt previously down into this realm, this world of things made n’ done?
Indeed.
If you sing with me, you will see; you shall see. A week will suffice.
A week?
Then we can bring your tale down to earth, from the realm of fantasy...
Fantasy?
Fantasy for you, dear friend, into the realm of things done, things seen, things experienced personally.
Ah... If I sing a week, if I’m ready to fly and swim, to weave the tapestry of things-worth-my-time into the fabric and fettle of things experienced as feelings felt.
Of things experienced as feelings felt
And that is what, when all is said and done.
In short, if I’m willing to leap from the limbo of no-poetry, or nein poe-y-tree, the lacklustre thrall of puddin-prose, back to the champion’s tale of what is in truth, our bourne, our forgotten ministry of minstrelsy, our fly-with-me friend, or turn your back on all that I be, and all that you too might be.
A week? – you say.
Give or take, a week’ll do, but what is time when we are fire breathing birds with songs inside, and skies waiting to be brought back down to earth?
Skies
Earth
Time
0=1
Cuckoo la la
