Mirrors and Hammers
I just found someone like myself in print.
And in person perhaps that would be completely untrue –
it may be just a distillation of a person I find on the page that I bend toward so longingly.
Perhaps in reality it would be so awkward and average.
Perhaps it’s in my eyes entirely (I never believe myself, I can’t at first, I can’t.).
But how could it be?
I’m certain if I keep reading, reading this person’s thoughts,
I’ll hit that inevitable bump
(he’ll be like the others)
that tells me I need NOT to know this person,
and that I was foolish all along,
and there is no such thing as a reason to connect,
at least not in a real-time sense.
All you really are entrusting your feelings to here are the snail-trails of a moving body sliming its human miasma across the universe. Let’s get Darwinian about it. You’ve no business expecting anyone to really have that much in common with you. The configurations of the meanings spoken are multiplied by the actual feelings that could never have been accurately sewn in words on a field of white. What you are looking at is not even the bloom of complete release.
I tell myself these things. These part-sorrows and part-truths.
I stuff my heart under the pillow like that. It gets dangerous and I have to.
But I keep reading, and I warm
and I recognize and smile and tears come
and I know I shouldn’t rejoice
when someone says the things he says.
The earnest, knife-clean depth of his honesty.
The dawning need for his self-celebration,
The ever present harshness of his self-humiliation,
and then up again to the muses and angels that give him his dignity back.
I know I shouldn’t rejoice. But I do.
Being who I am, with half a life behind me,
having come so far from that place of identity where he is now,
and still longing to go home to it, he’s there signing it.
He might think this is where life begins,
and later life will char and maim him into a different man.
But I tell you, I have come so far, such a large arc around,
and he is THERE, where I long to go home to, again.
Does it matter now that he knows nothing else?
This kind of youth is not for sending away to the attic,
This kind of youth is what keeps you from dying.
It’s more than the music, to keep you alive,
and that’s saying something.
I wrote long ago looking for someone in that youth.
That request for a man so different from others,
that when I found it it changed me immeasurably.
and now I come back around the curve to the end,
and I read this new one,
and he says he wants
“a girl who isn’t afraid to stare at the sun with me.”
And he means cut close to the depth of truth
and he means hold that stare to the real choices
and he means the greatest largest want
in the smallest of the interior worlds, his heart,
and it is
just what I meant then.