H.D. my patron saint

God

Some More Light Verse Wendy Cope

As I pull the bucket from the crude well, the water changes from dark to a light more silver than the sun. When I pour it over my body that is standing in the dust by the oleander bush, it sparkles easily in the sunlight with an earnestness like the spirit close up. The water magnifies the sun all along the length of it. Love is not less because of the spirit. Delight does not make the heart childish. We thought the blood thinned, our weight lessened, that our substance was reduced by simple happiness. The oleander is thick with leaves and flowers because of spilled water. Let the spirit marry the heart. When I return naked to the stone porch, there is no one to see me glistening. But I look at the almond tree with its husks cracking open int he heat. I look down the whole mountain to the sea. Goats bleating faintly and sometimes bells. I stand there a long time with the sun and the quiet, the earth moving slowly as I dry in the light.

So,​ your life. There it is before you – possibly a road, a ribbon, a dotted line, a map – let’s say you’re 25, then you make some decisions, do things, have setbacks, have triumphs, become someone, a bus driver, a professor of Indo-European linguistics, a pirate, a cosmetologist, years pass, maybe in a family maybe not, maybe happy maybe not, then one day you wake up and you’re seventy. Looking ahead you see a black doorway. You begin to notice the black doorway is always there, at the edge, whether you look at it or not. Most moments contain it, most moments have a sort of sediment of black doorway at the bottom of the glass. You wonder if other people are seeing it too. You ask them. They say no. You ask why. No one can tell you.

The Girl