- This topic is empty.
-
Â
Is the stair here?
Where’s the stair?
‘The stair’s right there,
But it goes nowhere.’
And the abyss? the abyss?
‘The abyss you can’t miss:
It’s right where you are—
A step down the stair.’
[ . . . ]
Too much reality can be a dazzle, a surfeit;
Too close immediacy an exhaustion:
As when the door swings open in a florist’s storeroom—
The rush of smells strikes like a cold fire, the throat freezes,
And we turn back to the heat of August,
Chastened.
So the abyss—
The slippery cold heights,
After the blinding misery,
The climbing, the endless turning,
Strike like a fire,
A terrible violence of creation,
A flash into the burning heart of the abominable;
Yet if we wait, unafraid, beyond the fearful instant,
The burning lake turns into a forest pool,
The fire subsides into rings of water,
A sunlit silence.
—Theodore Roethke
  “The Abyss”
- You must be logged in to reply to this topic.