The Light is Peeking Through Today

Monday, January 07, 2013

It is Monday and the routine has commenced again. School is back in session. Next week is finals for fall term. Primus has his senior sheet to turn in. This is the list of what I did and what matters to me that goes under your picture. Primus has hockey practice at day’s end. Secundus (currently on double secret probation for dishonesty and laziness) has play rehearsals.

Primus opted for a quote from Tom Waits to be included under his picture. I quite like it. “Better to be a failure on my own terms than a success on someone else’s.” He also offered freshman the advice that firewalls were overated. He opined that you are just four or five lines of code away from immortality.
Over the weekend I came in and worked. I actually got caught up on some things but today will have its challenges. I need to get rid of some very old case work. In that I will not be eating lunch with my wife there is a chance I can do that over the lunch hour. My hope is that I will remember to meditate then as well.
I came across the following poem over the weekend:



A Lemon

Out of lemon flowers

loosed

on the moonlight, love's

lashed and insatiable

essences,

sodden with fragrance,

the lemon tree's yellow

emerges,

the lemons

move down

from the tree's planetarium



Delicate merchandise!

The harbors are big with it-

bazaars

for the light and the

barbarous gold.

We open

the halves

of a miracle,

and a clotting of acids

brims

into the starry

divisions:

creation's

original juices,

irreducible, changeless,

alive:

so the freshness lives on

in a lemon,

in the sweet-smelling house of the rind,

the proportions, arcane and acerb.



Cutting the lemon

the knife

leaves a little cathedral:

alcoves unguessed by the eye

that open acidulous glass

to the light; topazes

riding the droplets,

altars,

aromatic facades.



So, while the hand

holds the cut of the lemon,

half a world

on a trencher,

the gold of the universe

wells

to your touch:

a cup yellow

with miracles,

a breast and a nipple

perfuming the earth;

a flashing made fruitage,

the diminutive fire of a planet.



Pablo Neruda

The poem is so full and so rich. It is a poem of sensual joy sexual but not sexual. It makes me long for a summer day with a vodka and tonic in hand and a beach before me. The text that goes: “Cutting the lemon the knife leaves a little cathedral: alcoves unguessed by the eye that open acidulous glass to the light;
topazes riding the droplets, altars, aromatic facades, “ captures the joyous sense of wonder I feel when I am working with a lemon in the kitchen.
Perhaps this poem with bring the brightness of citrus to my morning. Perhaps it will enliven me in a world dead in winter’s slumber.