Labuntur et Imputantur, by Ciaran Carson

[levvygotsky.livejournal.com]

It was overcast. No hour at all was indicated by the gnomon.

With difficulty I made out the slogan, Time and tide wait for no man.

I had been waiting for you, Daphne, underneath the dripping laurels, near

The sundial glade where first we met. I felt like Hamlet on the parapets of Elsinore,

Alerted to the ectoplasmic moment, when Luna rends her shroud of cloud

And sails into a starry archipelago. Then your revenant appeared and spake aloud:

I am not who you think I am. For what we used to be is gone. The moment’s over,

Whatever years you thought we spent together. You don’t know the story. And moreover,

 

You mistook the drinking-fountain for a sundial. I put my lips to its whatever,

And with difficulty I made out the slogan, Drink from me and you shall live forever.

Figs - DH Lawrence

[mirmusing.livejournal.com]

The proper way to eat a fig, in society,
Is to split it in four, holding it by the stump,
And open it, so that it is a glittering, rosy, moist, honied, heavy-petalled four-petalled flower.

Then you throw away the skin
Which is just like a four-sepalled calyx,
After you have taken off the blossom, with your lips.

But the vulgar way
Is just to put your mouth to the crack, and take out the flesh in one bite.

Every fruit has its secret.

The fig is a very secretive fruit.
As you see it standing growing, you feel at once it is symbolic :
And it seems male.
But when you come to know it better, you agree with the Romans, it is female.

The Italians vulgarly say, it stands for the female part ; the fig-fruit :
The fissure, the yoni,
The wonderful moist conductivity towards the centre.

Involved,
Inturned,
The flowering all inward and womb-fibrilled ;
And but one orifice.

The fig, the horse-shoe, the squash-blossom.
Symbols.