Читать книгу A Perhaps Line - Gary D. Swaim - Страница 4

While it is impossible to know how or when a unified view of the self, of the universe, may have been divided in our Western view of things, I function with a belief that my world is not dualistic. I tend to look to St. Paul or St. Augustine as responsible for the world’s heart rift—occasional heart drift, though I may be wrong. More likely, the “fault,” belongs to me, seeing things as falling into the categories of physical or spiritual, material or immaterial, providing a comfort that allows me to place my thoughts, based on ideas and experiences into pockets, exercising a degree of imagined control over the complexities of life. Perhaps that’s the reason I’ve divided this collection of poems into halves. But, the line separating the sections is porous or at least permiable. . .single words, stanzas, images, even entire poems moving back and forth between the material and the spiritual. I never seem to know which poem belongs where. And, readers may even quarrel with the inclusion of spiritual poems in such a collection.

Reporting honestly, I doubt the line exists at all but rather is fanciful. Thus, I’m going for poems rough around their edges from passing back and forth through “a perhaps line,” uncertain of their places, arbitrarily placed here or there—all partaking of the material and the spiritual. . .and not a few based on my six months hospitalization and fifty-four-day coma in 2006. I give them to you, with hope for any enjoyment you may derive.