ingress
helveticaneue
If hands could you free you, heart,
Where would you fly?
Philip Larkin asked the question, and a devilishly difficult one it is. Where would the free heart fly? If life was simple…if love was simple…the answer would be easy. The pathways of the heart would be clearly laid out and could be followed with magnetic certainty. Birds in migration would marvel at the unerring compass of our heart.
But life is rarely simple and love, as we’ve all learned, is nonlinear. Hands cannot free the heart; the heart can only free itself. Even then it traces no well-lit path. It hurls itself blindly into the dark. Or takes hesitant, tentative, timid steps, unwilling to risk too much. Or it follows the well-worn path of least resistance. Or it refuses to free itself at all, preferring the certitude of the cage.
Poets are heartless bastards to ask such questions, then leave us alone with our insufficient answers and our helpless hands and our own uncertain hearts.
Blog photograph copyrighted to the photographer and used with permission by utata.org. All photographs used on utata.org are stored on flickr.com and are obtained via the flickr API. Text is copyrighted to the author, greg fallis and is used with permission by utata.org. Please see Show and Share Your Work
