to my teachers… (a dedication)

I am grateful to those of my teachers,

Who, when the opportune time so arises,

(or as others less aflame might deign such innocent moments to be),

Venture not to burst my bubble of flimsy hope,

Of hastily knitted works gleaned from there and here,

Of pretenses at depth which my adolescent mind should fix,

Of some yearned for recognition on altars thought scholarly sound.

Of grave reductions, fatal surmises, and errors mountainous in scope.

Of artifices ambitious — knowing in truth solid ground to be unwound.

-

Who, with patience unassuming, deflect all my unreflected blows.

And allow me to traverse with Hermes’s wings,

Those fields of unending thought, stealing from one — then another,

Greedily, bit after audacious bit;

Till finally I weave this booty all together,

Secretly, in my lair of beguiling sloth;

Reveling in smug achievement,

Industriously — always seeking still better;

And realize that the tapestry is not yet complete,

For life, illusory, from disclosure full, flees in traditional retreat.

-

And I see an opening, one break to usher in unending chance,

A pause, however brief — now to work towards it unfailingly hard,

enough to make one eternal, beseeching,

Painfully unearthed from the natal spark;

That visible, and vaporous, fiend,

My one stony, and anxiously won,

that rightly deemed knowledgeable mark.