second childhood

remember the time that we could use

words we did not understand

to animate, rather than control,

the forms that nature envisioned us in?

 

the tree was not a tree then

it was the experience of a mystical giant

that our limbs prophetically bent to

to complete the motion that was already in them,

 

and the mountain stood smiling

with the sun spanning its wings behind

over the hatching rocks around us

where the dream of sleep was never forbidden,

 

we did not have to know the weight

in the words we borrowed from others

irrelevant was in them the eternity

that would have taught us our mistakes,

 

the nature that kindness showed us

were chords that strummed our veins

with the vibrations of unheard places

where we sang our mute pictures in

 

it seemed we did not have to live

to see their expectations fulfilled

that in our minds were rings

of possibilities that would have never trapped us in,

 

we could not have been apart then

for our hearts bit to the same drumming

that made the rain a revelation in every droplet

and even if we did not have languages to awaken the other with

our blood sufficed to our thirty minds

with the throbbing of motions we had lived,

 

but then we grew weary and tired

of the words that solidified their meaning

distancing us from the shimmering world

we once swam with playful delight in,

 

the tree became then a tree only

and mountains stopped smiling

but threaten our impotent steps

till we forced our dominion in overtopping them

 

we were no more welcomed in them

the forms that once echoed with kindness

now detached us from their spirits

too cruel a realization for the solitude we paid in exchange

 

and I wish I had been with you

no more than a child at your musky lap

trying to wear the innocent meaning

of the squirrel’s eyes deepening with its gods

withdrawn presences in the trees topped by mountains,

 

with you_my satanic Circean love_

I had lived the Ulyssean second childhood

crying my sea of tears for the voyage

that inevitably lured me to the bottom

of the too heavy burden of this limping maturity,

insecure in its renewed perishable significance,

once dreamed foregone in the recovered childhood