My beaches, roots washed bone-clever
By the tow and rinse of change –
They shade one instance only of me,
For circumstance is more than character.
At this bare fence I once turned left
And became another person: laughed
Where else I cried and now sit lingering
Looking at Japanese prints;
Or in a restaurant decked with pine
Cones taste in company
Silver carp and damson tart.
Along the walls
Other I’s went, strangers in word and deed,
Alien photocopies, spooks
Closer than blood-brothers, more alarming
Than haggard face spectral in empty room,
Lonelier than stone age campfires, doppelgangers.
They are my possibilities. Their pasts were once
My past, but in the surging wheels
And cogs become distorted. So, this one –
On a far-distant spoke! – danced
All night and had splendid lovers,
Wrote love letters still kept locked
Treasured in a bureau-drawer, knew girls
The world now knows by name and voice.
But this I chose to wander down
My stony beach, my own rejection.
My past is like a fable. Truly,
Circumstance is more than character.
Whatever other peel-offs saw –
My I was on the stranded alien land,
The restlessness of broken cities,
Mute messages that only after years
Open, the crime of vulnerability,
Patched land of people never known to be
Known or knighted, wild bombed world,
World where I taste the flavour on
The tongue, knowing not if my other eyes
Would call it happiness or doom.
I am, but what I am –
Others may know, others may care. Only
The dear light goes in her hand
Away among the childhood trees.
In the perspectives of my mind
It never dwindles. I always live
With myself; and that’s too much.
I need
The overpowering circumstance
The nostalgia of
That eternal return