HOW STRANGE TO RECALL CHILDHOOD AS AN AGING MAN

HOW STRANGE TO RECALL CHILDHOOD AS AN AGING MAN

How strange to recall childhood as an aging man

as if nothing had changed for the last sixty years

you’re watching yourself as a young boy

from a point of awareness somewhere in the air

above him like someone he couldn’t have foreseen becoming,

looking back upon him with great tenderness

that I’m what I made of his future as he

tries to reverse the bike chain he caught

his pant cuff in, and I can do nothing to help him

at this remove, except love him as someone should have then

when these strange tears didn’t taste so much of time.

Who could have guessed it would take all these years

to fill the absence in his heart up by becoming

the intimate familiar of the solitude of a child

who could befriend anything that was as lost and wild

and wounded as he was and yet could dream

of doing great things up late in his room at night

to prove he was at least as loveable as any achievement.

He was off to fight a holy war of one with himself

like a single infidel against the whole of Christendom

that I’m the living ruin of because sometimes it’s wiser

to be defeated than it is to prevail supreme

against your own dream of being worthy of love.

Time ripples in the growth rings of a tree

echoing the song of a well-seasoned nightbird

in the heartwood of a shedding maple

that remembers all the lyrics of longing and lament

it sings to itself at times like an arrow, a burnt guitar

struck by lightning, or one of the strong rafters

that uphold the soul like the keel of a lifeboat overturned

on the great night sea of a death in life

it drowned in more than once like moonset

among the corals that tore the bottom of its hull.

And how many cold nights did it take

before the syrups began to run sweetly in spring

and the new leaves forget the history of their roots

as I tried to abandon the child that I was

by the side of a road that led him away from me

because I thought one of us had to go homeless

in order to survive the firestorms of his outraged innocence

and the unaccusing guilt of mine as I grew up

letting him down in ways that only he can imagine

as I spread from one burning building to the next

like a new religion that wasn’t looking for converts?

But if you were to ask me now, I’d say it’s funny

how he turned out to be the Buddha sitting at the base

of the Bodhi tree of my spine, and on a good day,

at my best, before the fall, I’m Lucifer leading

the sun up at dawn like a child guiding a blind prophet

by the hand long before the morning star appeared

like Venus to those who were seeking enlightenment

without me or themselves to witness what neither of us

had attained like the key to the mystery of a universe

that had no locks on it to begin with to shut anybody out

or keep anybody in. The man in me doesn’t blame the child

for existing the way I do now trying belatedly

to embrace his rejection as a way of life

I can make up for by sharing this wounded solitude with him

like an injured animal he can see himself in

as a potential friend he could identify with

as if what had happened to me had once happened to him

and we could both approach each other with compassion.

PATRICK WHITE