I wonder if the bird wonders what it must me be to be - me.
Esse quam videri ( to be rather than
to seem to be) words carved into the living
tree the wounded bark.
Clouds too are my friends.
Feel as if I could step on one
have the wind roll me about.
Fields... a green patchwork quilt
River... a silver thread.
House--- a mere toy.
Time spreads out endlessly.
It is always and only forever.
The created and uncreated map of Now.
"Skin" or Gerard Manley Hopkins
as I will get to know him
both up our respective tree.
He in 1853. Me in 1963.
Drinking in the world with our eyes
and one big gulp of the mind.
*
REALITY'S UNRAVELLER
Charles Luxmoore on Gerard Manley Hopkins...
"...a fearless climber of trees, and would go up very high in the lofty elm tree, standing in our garden...to the the alarm of un-lookers like myself."
I on the other hand climbed trees to escape the world of my young sister's death...here at this great height I could be both in and out of the world...longing to be someone else...somewhere else....anywhere else...anyone else...even a bird if that could be...the map of the world spread below me...high above this bitter grief. I would "vanish" into bay windows and sit for hours whilst aunts and uncle stood a few feet from me and wondered where "the boy has gone" and call my name that didn't seem to be me anymore. I remember sitting between two silver milk churns down in Cork and everyone unseeing of me as if my grief had made me invisible. I was "Of reality the rarest-veined unraveller..."