To KC, on her first graduation
If I were the falconer
I might never let go;
I’d hold on to the tether
and you’d learn how to fly
in small circles around me:
I’d want you to know
the spirit of freedom,
so I’d give you the sky
in gradual increments,
ever so slowly
releasing you outward
and upward, and I
would remain in the center
within and below you,
the turn of your wild
and the ground to your sky,
the tame of your will
and the stage for your show,
but the one who allows you
the power to fly
is the one who eventually
has to let go.
I am not the falconer;
I don’t rule your sky,
nor would I deny you
the winds of your freedom,
but I will stand fast
in the fields you came from
calling your name out
and watching you fly.
May I presume, symposiates, to extend this Tuesday afternoon from classroom conditions to belles lettres sublime. Not that the classroom was bad--we talked Measure for Measure and Hamlet and (strangely in context) Prufrock and the variegated strains of my 'Creative Writing' elective (ineffable, but to the main): the classroom was good. And this poem is great.
ReplyDeleteStart with the title: 'denouement' is the best gift from France, the ravel and unravel of far more than plot. We sometimes reduce: is this story (think Gatsby) more open or closed, more comic or tragic, more mine or theirs?
But then think of Yeats and the spiraling sense of "The Second Coming". I agree here with Jon that the 'rocking cradle' is more Easteresque than the breathless attempts we make of the manger, which can and cannot sustain 33 years. Read everything twice, reread and then pray.
Because nothing is easy or reign-in-able. "I'd give you the sky" (l. 8) reminds us of Dickinson's challenge: "The brain is wider than the sky"--Eric and other metaphysicians should surely weigh in. How can the brain contain sky and how can...
"the tame of your will / and the stage for your show" suffice to show us what.. you... will.. to know?
Hamlet (as lit class reminds us) sought stage for his solace: if nothing is easy, at least seek the stage, for playing a part may simulate ease, but play won't sustain, and
"nor would I deny" the "rule" or "your sky"--yes, I'm splicing here, but that's much the point: God knows what God won't reveal (or what my eyesight refuses or faux squinnies to see): I'm not the point, you're free to be what I, sadly or not, may never see.
That's denouement. That's mystery. And (lest we leave Luther and others aside) that's our theology. Never to rule the horizons, but to fly free.
From brother and uncle Daniel--there's plenty here, KC, to untwine. Love, and go to.