In honor of the beginning of “Wiman Week” here in Charlottesville, here is a doozie from Every Riven Thing, originally published in The Atlantic:
Incurable and unbelieving
in any truth but the truth of grieving,
I saw a tree inside a tree
rise kaleidoscopically
as if the leaves had livelier ghosts.
I pressed my face as close
to the pane as I could get
to watch that fitful, fluent spirit
that seemed a single being undefined
or countless beings of one mind
haul its strange cohesion
beyond the limits of my vision
over the house heavenwards.
Of course I knew those leaves were birds.
Of course that old tree stood
exactly as it had and would
(but why should it seem fuller now?)
and though a man’s mind might endow
even a tree with some excess
of life to which a man seems witness,
that life is not the life of men.
And that is where the joy came in.
To listen to Christian doing an astounding reading of an astounding poem, go here.
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2 responses to “From a Window – Christian Wiman”
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Yes. That is the stuff of luminosity. Many thanks.