OTI:one poem and notes:7/29/16

Open To Interpretation

Zoo

A wonderful fact to reflect upon,
That every living creature is constituted
To be that profound secret and mystery to every other.
A solemn consideration, when I enter a great city's zoo by night,
That every one of those darkly clustered cages
Encloses its own secret;
That every niche in every one of them encloses its own secret;
That every beating heart
In the (hundreds of) thousands of beasts there,
Is, in some of its imaginings, a secret to the heart nearest it!
Something of the awfulness,
Even of Death itself,
Is referable to this.
No more can I turn the leaves
Of these dear books that I love,
And vainly hope in time to read them all.
No more can I look into the depths of  unfathomable water,
Wherein, as momentary lights glanced into it,
I have had glimpses of buried treasure and other things submerged.
It was appointed that the Book Of Life should shut with a spring,
For ever and for ever, when I had read but a page.
It was appointed that the water should be locked in an eternal frost,
When the light was playing on its surface,
And I stood in ignorance on the shore.
My dog is dead,
My neighbour is dead,
My love, the darling of my soul, is dead;
It is the inexorable consolidation and perpetuation
Of the secret that was always in that individuality,
And which I shall carry in mine to my life's end.
In (any (of the (burial-places) of) this zoo through which I pass,
Is there a sleeper more inscrutable
Than the sleeping city inhabitants are,
In their innermost personality,
To me,
Or than I am to them?

DolphinWords

After a prose passage by Charles Dickens in A Tale Of Two Cities...word changes are in italics...words to be left out are in parenthesis...the side to side format of the prose has been made into free verse poem line lengths...for origin on web for text I'm using see wikiquote here...

Notes: I thought all day about doing it...just unabashedly changing Dickens' prose bit I quoted a couple posts back, stealing not only the sentiment, as it is one I've been working on, but most all the words too!...It is still Dickens'!...sometimes folk do this with things like the Declaration of Independence...in fact, I have...'We hold these truths to be self evident, all living creatures are created equal, and are endowed by their creator with certain unalienable rights, and that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness'...few know that 'happiness' at the time had a whole philosophy associated with it...it took awhile to free the slaves...it'll take a much longer while to free Nature, sadly...Sumatra Rhino's are gone in the wild...and Giraffes are getting scarce...pic of baby rhino being rescued from somewhere during flood...today's cull...should I apologize to Dickens?...no, Dickens was all about the poor and downtrodden...Curiously, Dickens doesn't alliterate, or rhyme, at all...very un-Melville like!

:)

DavidDavid