Second Childhood (2 page)

It does call. And you climb the stairs obediently, pushing aside books and notes to let it know that you have returned to it, all is well.

If you don’t answer its call, you sense that it will sink towards a deep gravity and adopt a limp.

From loneliness you learn very little. It pulls you back, it pulls you down.

It’s the manifestation of a vow never made but kept: I will go home now and forever in solitude.

And after that loneliness will accompany you to every airport, train station, bus depot, café, cinema, and onto airplanes and into cars, strange rooms and offices, classrooms and libraries, and it will hang near your hand like a habit.

But it isn’t a habit and no one can see it.

It’s your obligation, and your companion warms itself against you.

You are faithful to it because it was the only vow you made finally, when it was unnecessary.

If you figured out why you chose it, years later, would you ask it to go?

How would you replace it?

No, saying good-bye would be too embarrassing.

Why?

First you might cry.

Because shame and loneliness are almost one.

Shame at existing in the first place. Shame at being visible, taking up space, breathing some of the sky, sleeping in a whole bed, asking for a share.

Loneliness feels so much like shame, it always seems to need a little more time on its own.

The monk is a single

and so am I

but which kind?

All of them

from young to wild

and the boyish one

(mine) cared for the weak

until there was no one

to care for him

besides an old woman

who lived as a she.

I became a penitent

sequentially:

first in sandals

then in boots

then with a hood

and bare feet.

Now night-bound, now nude, then old.

Another brother and I took a train with a view of mountains

floating in water

out of Limerick Junction

to Heuston Station where Wittgenstein

tried to discover emotion.

He hit a horizon.

“Philosophy should only be written as poetry.”

In a Sabbath atmosphere you stand still and look backwards

for time has ceased its labors

and no cattle tremble.

You can contemplate the peripheries

and for a flash see the future as a field in a semi-circle.

Everything is even on the Sabbath. The died and the living.

Each person or place wants you as much as you want another.

Towards a just

and invisible image

behind each word

and its place in a sentence

we must have been sailing.

Scarcely defended, best

when lost from wanting perfect sense.

But still, recognizable.

Be like grass, the phantom told us:

lie flat, spring up.

Our veils were scrolls

you couldn’t walk into

but only mark the folds.

I’ve lost my child at the bend where we parted.

We will never come back to that hour.

Let me write about the place again the path so sandy

and the table cloth blowing in a wind from Newfoundland.

It was here it began. She left her bouillabaisse untouched

and headed out on the train.

Sort of, soft, gold at sunset, turrets and sandals

were hard to identify so many copies.

Let me concentrate on ancestral faces

and I will recognize hers

before my powers fail and our DNA has been smeared

on cups and cigarettes, bottles and gloves, bowls and spoons

and replicated, sucked or kissed into the lips of strangers.

I have to pass through the estuary

to investigate breakdown as a trail of nerve-endings

at the beginning of everything.

Scrapes like threads seeking holes.

It’s a strange textile that serves as a road map.

This one did:

its blue led to the edge.

Where could a fabric begin and end except as a running woman

who sews and passes it along?

So I ran with it in my hands.

A kind of eucharist.

No break in its material from the first day on earth

to the Sabbath where all are equal

and the cows covered in sackcloth.

Where has my mind gone?

The bloody thieves

are very quick.

You may have noticed I’m naked

and sliced by glass.

Soon words will be disappeared

and then the Celtic church

and seven friends

I will not name.

One word that contains

so many:

dearth, end, earth, ear, dirt, hen, red, dish, it and

I must examine each part

then cut the ropes without a heart and set out.

The slide downhill on my back to a ledge

and the sea out there and a city

to the left of the mud.

The place they call an area

preparing for an earthquake. Under-shade and crowds

of hungry old people lining for bread.

One woman collapsed on her side

and another helped her up

and I was let into the bunker

by the best kind of communist.

There was orange vomit on a large cape over a large woman.

The hills! No bells.

I went down for what reason.

Not to enter a cell.

Luckily no one was white.

We discovered we were in a loft space from the olden days

that I indicated pleased me

because I couldn’t get my body out no matter what.

I paused long enough to encounter

a slender elder with the delicate posture of a Rastafarian.

The people were indifferent as they are to whites but polite.

The lean man showed me the door in colorful clothing.

But there was a huge blast from the building beside us

And we ran up rickety stairs to look at what

was now a structure speared with broken glass and stone.

A worker was already being transported on a stretcher.

We looked around at the mess then went inside to discuss

our love of failures, every one of us.

I hauled so many children after me

with ropes and spears and nets