What were there long before the trees
on the hillside glint the sun, or shuddered
with the wind and cold.
The smell of coffee and burnt toast,
or cut flowers from the garden.
And when I get rained on flicker in the dark.
They dazzle at first light.
Even all day they are in the body,
like the robin on the lawn singing to the mockingbird,
who winks and constructs other sweet moments.
I have studied their whispers in the blue.
The tomatoes have ripened and been picked,
they must let loose their dreams as if
they were candles too.
Walking into the kitchen I feel like a warm place,
and I have worked the gold.
There are treasure mornings.
But wait, wait… haven’t you heard?
I hope you arrive to read the poems woven like silk,
their silence heals the long solstice.
When one door closes
another opens as if on command,
so many prisms blooming!
Something, something. There is always treasure
and I want to be sure to celebrate.
Stephen Cipot
Garden City Park
Author’s note. I used to occasionally write letters to authors whose works I appreciated, which included famous authors. Sometimes I received a thoughtful reply.
On one occasion, however, I opened an out-of-the-blue letter to marvel at a British stamped envelope and reveled in a lengthy detailed multi-page reply from my favorite British author.
Mr. Frederic Michael Raphael had written the screenplays to movies I enjoyed: “Two For The Road,” staring Audry Hepburn and Albert Finney, nominated for best screenplay, and “Darling,” which starred Julie Christie, for which Mr. Raphael had won the Oscar for best screenplay.
I wrote Mr. Raphael because he was a classics scholar who studied at Cambridge where the famous philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein taught, who was one of the greatest philosophers of the 20th century.
Wittgenstein’s father was a leading captain of industry in Austria; young Wittgenstein had left Austria for Britain to study at Cambridge before the Nazis assumed power.
When the Nazis gained control they of course nationalized Jewish property and industry. Accordingly, Wittgenstein briefly returned to Germany to forfeit wealth and property that amounted to around 5% of Austria’s GDP, to arrange safe passage for his siblings and avoid certain death.
Worthy of note, decades prior the brilliant young school-age Wittgenstein had attended the same school at the same time as a somewhat dull student named Adolph Hitler. While no one can say there is definitive evidence the two ever met, it is assumed Hitler knew of the family’s great fame and fortune.
If so, proving never underestimate the sheer twisted power of jealousy.
That said, I wrote Mr. Raphael seeking advice on how to proceed with a work of fiction I was attempting about an ancient Greek philosopher named Callisthenes, who was Aristotle’s nephew whom Aristotle schooled in private with Alexander the Great.
C and Alexander were childhood friends, one became a philosopher, and the other a megalomaniac and worse. C later became Alexander’s official historian and publicist during Alexander’s wanton campaign—really a rampage of death and destruction across Asia Minor to India to conquer the then-known world.
C met his untimely end in Persia when he was skewered by a drunken Alexander over a disagreement that Alexander was not a god. All of C’s works and writings were subsequently lost, what remains are only second and third-hand fragments by later Greek and Latin writers and historians.
During the Middle Ages, fabricated “Callisthenes discoveries” popularized as love fiction appeared that had no basis in reality.
Anyway, I was mostly stuck with the English translations of Greek and Latin historians who summarized Aristotle’s campaigns where C received barely a footnote.
Anyway, my so-called history never amounted to more than far-too-many piecemeal fabrications and inconsequential alterations to note.
The advice I received was there is pretty much always something interesting hidden in experience, and to write having a philosophy.
In hindsight and taking the long view, that appears to be my philosophy if not exactly rigorous. The fruitful back-and-forth letter writing with Mr. Raphael lasted a few years, for which I am always appreciative, humbled, and exceedingly grateful.
