Who was there in the uncountable stars, in the distance,
And in the cold glittering?
Who leaned with the wind against the trees all day,
And who slept in the swing’s empty stillness under them?
Who was present in the pattern of the snake fading
Into the pattern of the leaves again?
And who presided over the empty clarity of water falling,
Water spreading into a thin, white veil
Glimpsed just once in a moment clear & empty as a heaven—
Once heaven has been swept clean of any meaning?
Whose childhood is no more than a blackened rafter,
Something left after fire has swept through it?
*
It is years later when I come back to that place where I’d hiked once,
And somehow lost the trail, & then,
For a while, walked in the Company of Hallucination & Terror,
And noted afterward, like something closing within me,
That slight disappointment when I found
The trail again, when the rocks & trees took
Their places beside it, & I went on, up
To the summit of bare rock & the smoke rising
Lazily out of the small hut there, soup & coffee,
A table of brochures & maps of hiking trails
I browsed through idly, recalling being lost,
Recalling the way each rock looked, how
Expressionless it was, how each
Was the same as another, without a face, until
I understood I was completely lost, & then
How someone so thin I could have passed my hand through him
Walked beside me there, & though I did not dare look
To see who it was, I glanced sideways once to see
How his ribs depicted famine, & how his steps beside me
Were effortless, were like air gliding through air
Again & again without haste or hesitation
As the trail appeared again under my feet & rose
Upward in a long series of switchbacks
Through a forest I no longer believed in.
What I felt was diminishment, embarrassment, &
He must be starving by now, his face multiplying
To become the haunted faces of others in the streets,
Where to walk at night is to be flayed alive beneath
The freezing rain, where the trees glisten with ice,
And the lights are left on all night in the big stores,
If the pleasure of his company does not last,
If the terror of his company does not last,
If forgetting or remembering him are the same, now,
As I slow the car, pull over to the curb,
And wait until I see my dealer emerge
Cautiously as always from the fenced walkway beside
An abandoned house in a street of abandoned,
Or nearly vacant & for sale, houses,
And if, by getting high, one can live
Effortlessly anywhere for a little while, if
Me & my dealer, a Jamaican named John Donne,
Gaze out at the rain & listen to the hushed clatter
Of an empty metal shopping cart someone pushes through the rain,
If we gaze out at the living, & at the dead, & they are the same,
If the sound of a bus going past & the sound of the wind
Are the same, are what is left to listen to in the world,
Though the world sleeps, & the trees above us sleep, their limbs
Mending themselves in the cold wind,
Then both of Us would avert our Faces from His Face.
from The Southern Review