Fire on the mountain, fire under the lake. Like children, we look on and dream. We are loved, and none of the images for love is absolute, so we are frightened. We cast a glance into our past, and not at any remarkable affair but ordinary efforts -- that spray of light at breakfast where we ran out of milk -- we feel as somehow true. Dare we touch it with a word it loses its meaning, though not its beauty. It becomes a fire in the heart, incomprehensible and expressive, an image of the whole, so that when finally a man falls in love with life, it is like an arbor begged of a desert, for he has accepted the mirage. Now he is filled with goodness, as if the unknown were something somehow slightly slowed, a whole world in one mountain, pool, and sky under which we sit sipping milk. So we are twelve again, our sexual experience of the world focused on that tree under which we undress. The willow caresses us with a sudden gust, but we have already turned, made up our mind. It's very cold in the mornings, and hot by noon. Plants grow slowly and never die completely. Nowhere is there greater sympathy than between the porcelain sky and the chlorinated waters of the pools. Still it stays with us that at any moment a miracle might enter us as easily. For we are lucky, we are children in their fullest expression -- lonesome because we are moving through time like a dot that becomes a sleeping figure who is actually dead, who has been killed, and from whose nightmare we continually wake into another world, a moment we feel like kissing someone's half-open mouth, once only an image of fire and water. | Discover our Poem Explanations and Poet Analyses!Other Poems of Interest...THE DEFILED SANCTUARY by WILLIAM BLAKE THE MOTHER'S HOPE by SAMUEL LAMAN BLANCHARD THE OLD WOMAN by JOSEPH CAMPBELL SONNET TO A FRIEND WHO ASKED, HOW I FELT ... MY INFANT TO ME by SAMUEL TAYLOR COLERIDGE TO DOCTOR EMPIRIC by BEN JONSON THE WILD SWANS AT COOLE by WILLIAM BUTLER YEATS |