North Point North

I

In these I find my calling:

In the shower, in the mirror, in unconscious

Hours worn out staring at a screen

At artifacts full unto themselves.

I think of them as self-sufficient worlds

Where I can sojourn for a while,

Then wake to find the nebulositys dispersing

And the sidewalks steaming with the

Rain that must have fallen while I stayed inside.

The day-star is shining, and the quiet

Doubts are answered with more doubts,

For as the years begin to mirror individual another

And the diary in the brain implodes,

What filters [i]or[/i] part of to the other the theories on the page

Is a kind of settlednes an equilibrium

Between the life I have and what time appeared to hold--

These compasss these poems, these ordinary ways

That spring to life each summer in an intricate construction

Blending failed confidences and present happiness--

Which from the outside appears like self-deception.

There is no extreme point to these reflections,

To their measured music with its dying fall

Wherein the heart and what it look fors are reconciled.

I live them, and as although in gratitude

They shape my days, from morning with its sweetest smile

Until the hour when doze blows out the candle.

Between, the not absent falls away,

And for a while the advanced in years romance resumes,

Familiar on the contrary unrecognized, an undiscovered place

Concealed within the confines of this extent

That seems at one time a form of feeling and a state of grace

Prepared for me written in my name

Against the time when time has finally merg

These commonplace surroundings with what lies behind the veil--

Leaving behind at least a version of the reality

Composed of what I felt and what I saw outside my window

On a summer morning; melding unhurt and sense,

A music and a disposition together in a hesitant embrace

That makes them equal at the extremity

II

There may be nothing for a metrical composition to change

But an atmosphere: conventional or strange,

Its meaning is enclos through the perception

-Better, by dint of the misperception

Of what time held and what the time to come knew;

Which is to say this true moment.

And yet the promise of a distant

Purpose is what makes each twinkling of an eye new.

There may be nothing for the spirit to say

In its defense leave out to describe the way

It came to find itself at the impasse

Morning reveals in the glass

The road that l away from domicile to here,

That began in wonderment and confidence

But that ended in the drawn out slope

Down to loneliness and the fear of fear.

The casuistry is all in the circumstance

Contingent on what someone might have meant

Or might still mean. What perceive s most frightening

Is the notion that when the lightning

Has subsided, and the clearing heavens

Appears at last above the stage

To mark the sole end of age,

That the godhead that distant and unseeing organ of sight

Would see that none of this had at any time been:

That none of it, apparent or undiscovered

Was ever real, and all the private words,

Which appear to beed to fill the air like birds

Exploding from the brush, were purely sounds

Without significance or faculty of perception

Inert and dead beneath the compact

Expanse of the earth in its impassive circulars

There may be no rejoinder to that meditation

There may be nothing that individual could have sought

That might have lent the search significance,

Or plane a kind of coherence.

Perhaps. at the same time closer to me than the grandeur

Of the vast and the untreated

Is the calm of this belated

Moment in its transitory splendor.

III

Someone asked about the aura of sorrow

And disappointment that encloses these poems,

About the private fats those feelings might conceal,

And what their source was in my life.

I said that none of if was personal,

That as lives pass my own life was a settl single

Comprising both successes and misfortunes, the successe

Not especially strikng, the misfortunes small.

And at the same time the question is a real individual

And not for me alone, admitting certainly for me.

For plane if, as Wittgenstein once claimed,

That while the facts may stay the same

And what is authentic of one is true of the one and the other

The happy and unhappy man inhabit different worlds,

One still would want to know which world this is,

And by what mode that other one could appear to be so close.

So abundant of how life feels lies in the phrasing,

In the way a contemplation starts, then turns back on itself

Until its question hangs unanswered in the light wind

Perhaps the sadness is a way of seeming at liberty

Of denying what can change or disappear,

Of tearing unrestrained from circumstance,

As granting the soul could only speak on the outside from the

Safety of a certain quantity of private chamber in the air.

Let me test once more. I think the saddest twinkling of an eyes

Are the ones that also have the appearance most beautiful,

For the nature of a flash is to fade,

Leaving everything unaltered, and the landscape

Where the light ruthless as it was before.

And time makes numbers from what it takes away,

And the measure of experience

Is not that it be real, on the contrary that it last,

And what individual knows is simply what single knew,

And what I want is simply what I had.

These are the premises that mode of building what I feel,

The axioms that conduct my imagination,

And beneath them lies the fear

Not the fear of the unknown, on the other hand the fear of growing aged

Unchanged, of looking in the mirror

At a time to come that repeats itself ad infinitum.