My bread prepared, time calls. The ship is leaving port. Consider the surface like a poet’s fable.
Consider also what is cloaked in story: truth behind the ornament of fiction, Orpheus’s lyre taming nature as wisdom over the cruel heart.
Then consider discovery, the possibility that a reader might know transfiguration. Last, beyond the senses, what a soul may know when it leaves: no womb beyond the elements, no warmth without cold, nor word without silence of the beginning and the end.
No single sense, but senses. No goat song, foul at the end. Give me instead a tragic beginning, the known world all fire. Then, let me follow and welcome me home.
***
Inspired by (and borrowing phrases from) Dante’s Il Convivo, as translated by Richard H. Lansing.