Another alternate autobiography. It's really (with all possible
confusion to postmodernists) quite beautiful.
The Gates
They are an extension of that State
I imagined, which would not,
as its enemies claimed, keep us in childhood
but make up its deficiencies.
Those enemies, like every enemy
and state, dispersed,
dismayed …
or remaining on Earth,
which will become a rest home
for ideas, faded, querulous,
growing ever smaller:
the possessed object arousing only nostalgia.
For when you enter a Gate (the word
so quickly losing its capital),
it processes you
to worlds whose air you can breathe
and viruses sneeze away,
whose gravity puts a spring in your step
or a not unpleasant languor.
I suppose one could tour,
with help, the gas giants,
view crystal megaliths by sulfur seas,
but I won't, for the moment; death remains
not that far out of the way.
One is, after all, a tourist.
It takes effort to become a wanderer.
I'm getting there.
- Avoid the bars, the mountaintop cafes
with a view of multiple sunsets,
where humans go. Where fashion
is to praise nothing seen
but traffic jams or childhoods
in Pyongyang, Delhi, Cleveland,
till a word takes one home.
But a wanderer sees and wants to see
nothing of his own.
Time is energy, the Gates attest,
and time is my time.
Last week I walked on vaguely orange grass
to a blue town
whose people waved their spindly arms
(?) in the air continually.
The gesture held no malice; I live.
They had no eyes, which I found somehow restful.
They fed me - at least there was food -
and buzzed; in motion, favored the ellipse.
But the planet was overcast
and I had little to give,
so moved another thousand light-years -
their Now, and mine -
to where there were stars.
(I think I love the different patterns most
or lack of pattern.)
We sat, some eggplant sage and I,
in a clearing, with a kind of notebook.
One grows adept at drawing the view from Earth.
When I finished my dots, we listened
to the noises of his night.
He shrugged or nodded
some truism about the larger sky.
It's shameful to admit, but aliens
have become less important;
however at home they are, they too seem tourists.
Our fire, that other constant, waned.
Our two strange faces read its glowing embers.
I have outrun the turmoil of my youth,
I said. Have abandoned meaning
(he: That's for sure)
and care and company, save that of death.
Then the being, in whatever
medium, chided:
Vertical questions find only lateral answers.
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