Читать книгу The Skin of Meaning - Keith Flynn - Страница 23

With great risk comes greater risk

and to live in the inquiry is to abandon

the safe proximity of childish expectation.

Be careful, my father says, at every parting,

as if he remembered the lesson of Cicero,

though he does not, whose head was separated

from its body politic and raised on a pike,

after a lady, not a lover, stuck a pin

through his tongue with a sign that foretold

the editorial. Enough of his eloquence, the

message read, and one would have to possess

the brain of a chickpea not to get its point.

Context is a faith that cuts both ways,

a perfectly fitted gown, and the greatest gift,

even among the gods, is the suave, authentic

remnant of silent knowing, the arched eyebrow,

the well-placed wink, bereft of seductive

diffidence, beaten clean of detached ambivalence,

robust with plenty in reserve, dense with sly

experience, and remarkably, all in—