The Sense of a Journey


1

In the middle of life’s way, I suddenly
asked myself, *Is this real*? – Any
rational universe would allow
time out, a rest stop combining
features of a posh old-world resort
and places on the Jersey Turnpike … The cheap
buses leave, but always
one or two passengers have bailed.  Who,
reborn as social organisms, find
instant conviviality
over burgers and high tea.  They walk
in the dog runs, admire the sudden gardens.
The longer one stays,
the more abstract become
the tank farm, self-storage units,
and long-failed factory
over the highway, as well as where one was going
and where, in any sense, one was coming from.
It is enough to be
a nice guy.  Words are as optional
as ties; and the old lie of gurus
that heaven lies about us in the moment,
is true.  In any rational universe.

2

They may have been a legion
forgotten by the mercenary army
that Xenophon led home
and whose heroism he recorded
in the *Anabasis.  Or perhaps they dated
from the time of the nation-state,
having served some Raj or Soviet
to pursue a Great Game, and being
abandoned by it.  But they spoke
no known language except
that of soldiers: shock, gibbering
grief, an exclusionary
brotherhood to the point
of depersonalization, bottomless
anomie.  They came out
of the desert wearing untraceable
rags, their weapons a deconstructed
vision of rifles or swords.  For any
technology rusts, unless we consider
nature itself a technology.  Their eyes
were disturbing, making one feel
all sight is a subset
of the thousand-yard stare.  And they stood
apparently waiting to report
to someone, or for help, or even
pay.  Which were slow in coming,
for what did they belong to?  Whom
did they serve besides some delighted
conservative commentators crowing
(erroneously) about loyalty unto death?

3

The lovers on their travels see
the castle across the river,
above the little town,
not as looming or cruel,
but sheltering, kindly.
The dawn mist lifts
as they sip their coffee,
and they see other castles,
each on its crag,
each in sunlight before
its covey of houses
and steeples, wherever
the river twists.
A long barge passes.
Still barely awake,
almost shy with the joy
of the night, the lovers
imagine and share,
without speaking, the thought
of a network of castles,
an aerial country
extending before them
from mountain to mountain.
Though the day will be warm,
the morning is chill
and they sit, not on the terrace,
but indoors.  The old lace
tablecloth seems
to have been willfully stained
and torn, like the one
Meyerowitz photographed
in a welfare hotel.

4

I loved Philip Pullman’s Gnostic attack
on that reactionary Christian hack
Tolkien.  But he lost me,
Pullman did, in his third book,
when the dead escape
the concentration camp
where the paranoiac, moribund
God and his endlessly plotting
henchmen – now defeated by Youth –
had left them.  They rise,
the dead, from where they sat
useless in dimness, trying not to merge,
and climb into the air,
into Nature, where they willingly
renounce individuality,
becoming one with stone and tree
and the famous Cycle, in which everything
(as Santayana said) is food …
Fuck that.  I won’t buy it.
Not as joy, or as fulfillment.
My self is admittedly a composite –
a rug, some cats, a slap,
menthol 100s, some Beckmanns,
and Britten’s Second String Quartet;
nobody could make sense of that,
much less a system.  Yet I carry it
(heavily, but that’s not the point)
always, and all roads lead to it.
I’d like it to outlast the quarks;
would toss it like a spiky thistle
beneath each swift bare running foot.