There is a thicket of history and habit and self story
thorny and tangled
choked and dense
it pulls at my clothes, catches and nicks my skin as I work my way through, slow work, salty and stinging
But I am clearing, I am.
my mind tries to attach a picture, of a garden gate, or other archway, but the path is not that clear, and not clear like that
it is more that suddenly I’ve cleared enough to see the fiddleheads tucked down into the loaming leaves, I can see the greening vines, tendrils wrapped around a thousand thousand textures of bark, lichen and stone… I have cleared enough so there is space enough to see the beauty in the tangle, to feel a change in the way the air moves, to see a change in the way light slants in
For Kate to read aloud–
Dante, The Inferno, Canto 1:
” Midway on our life’s journey, I found myself
In dark woods, the right road lost. To tell
About those woods is hard–so tangled and rough
And savage that thinking of it now, I feel
The old fear stirring: death is hardly more bitter.
And yet, to treat the good I found there as well
I’ll tell what I saw, though how I came to enter
I cannot well say, being so full of sleep
Whatever moment it was I began to blunder
Off the true path. But when I came to stop
Below a hill that marked one end of the valley
That had pierced my heart with terror, I looked up
Toward the crest and saw its shoulders already
Mantled in rays of that bright planet that shows
The road to everyone, whatever our journey.
Then I could feel the terror begin to ease
That churned in my heart’s lake all through the night.
As one still panting, ashore from dangerous seas,
Looks back at the deep he has escaped, my thought
Returned, still fleeing, to regard that dim defile
That never left anyone alive who stayed in it….”
Translated-Robert Pinsky