INTIMATELY ALONE IN THE ABYSS

INTIMATELY ALONE IN THE ABYSS

Intimately alone in the abyss

equally ashes and shining

there’s a rootless man

walking around on the earth

being introduced and accepted

as knowable and known,

who thinks he’s me.

He suspects he’s a crosswalk

but I know he’s a ladder

a rung shy of rescue.

There’s never been any security in security

and you don’t have to be a full moon

to agitate the asylum

or much of an autumn to lose things,

people included, so he gets up and goes to sleep

and eats and shits and walks and sits like everyone else

who live like unopened loveletters among the bills

with no return address.

Every step he takes is a one-way threshold

and he already knows the value

of everything he seeks

before he’s found it.

Now the stupid think

there’s only one mode of seeing through their eyes

but I know the seeing of the dragon

is not the watching of the flies.

However they cluster like constellations.

Now here a lot of people

will start to worry about

what the stupid think

but I wouldn’t advise it

because that’s what they do.

The less it means the more it can be

and the rest is written on flypaper.

Everywhere I look

I see the north star shining above me

but I don’t mistake my spiderwebs for maps

to the spirit’s lost and found.

Not lost, not found, not bound or free,

my eyes don’t dilute the darkness

with the clarity of the blind

when there’s nothing, really nothing to see.

I’m sixty now. More a mystic statistic

of the jewel in the dreamcatcher

that keeps me away from myself

like the beginning of a recurring nightmare

than a scarecrow playing with matches,

but I’m still a mirror you don’t want to look into.

PATRICK WHITE