The Way

© 2015  Steve King

All rights reserved

Everything I read,

the musics that I hear,

grave statuaries gesturing to me

depictions, portraiture,

the call of this or that philosophy—

each of these, you say,

reflect a distillation

of some perfected world.

But only through another’s heart, I say.

These will not levitate me on their own

to some, or other, supposed place or time,

undoing what the world has done to me,

forestalling what it yet may do,

or often breach the shadows

that flow across each moment

of even the most casual of the minds.

Such beauties as here be

are like the concrete guards,

or steel fence poles,

or rounding moats,

or bright signposts

or winding stairs,

or dreaming notes

that channel this journey

through what I hope

shall one day be a life—

guides only to my wandering

toward that far pathway

dimly held in my present guesswork,

yet one that has been ever laid for me.

Though never on my journeys

in that quest for latent grandeurs,

hidden still in that stubborn array,

shall I expect some sudden perfect vista to appear.

Those worlds barely foreshadowed

by all these things

I read and see and hear:

those things that pose between our meanings—

dark for me, for you so blinding clear.

(A new poem to be shared in the Imaginary Garden

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