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
