The Difference

It was not a dream like any of the others. We talked long, the woman and I, walking through a dark endless alley. She said that there is no meaning outside this place, there is only void and chaos. This is where the meaning is. And she said that we must all find a door which does not open at some point in our lives. We must forgive the limits of thought, yet never cease to hate them. She said many things, and after she had said these things I remembered, finally, to ask her who she was. 

“I am the sun.”

“The sun in the sky?” I said.

“The sun in the sky, but I am walking with you now.”

I saw how she shone then, but differently than light. I said, “Will you tell me something? I think I have been afraid for a long time. How do we know that everything is not just an appearance, an illusion? A dream? How do I know I am really talking to you?”

She was quiet for a long while.

“Tell me,” she said at last, “if the world were an illusion, how would it look? If it were real, how would it look? Where is the difference? There is no other way things could be.”

But just as I began to understand this, I woke.

Confession to the Tormentor

The tips of my thumbs turn cold 

outside the glove

these truncated days of December.

I look around and can’t tell 

what matters, or what 

in one year I’ll remember.

In the park, people

drag shadows like a history,

and feed on things 

grown a hundred miles from center.

New York’s full of them, like

arms stretching out 

from a splendor 

but not ending anywhere.

Just stretching and stretching, 

a vast loneliness monster.

Torture me for the meaning 

of my life, tormentor,

even for twenty-nine years;

I can still give no answer.

Maybe there’s never been.

Then last night, my brother said 

something I once believed, 

and now I believe again.

Running with the Demon

i.
At Prospect Park in mid-November, 
five Gold Rush apples in my bag,
I remember a summer years ago 
in the Trossachs, where I sat on a bank

with bluebells in the clear light, remembering 
another summer yet, in Saskatchewan, 
and a book called Running with the Demon, 
about a girl who sees what no one else sees 

and evil on the increase, and how 
to read it as a boy was so like the ache 
of recalling it now, with the bluebells all around,  
that it seems all feeling must be nourished 

by the sense of once being more purely felt,
the past shining with pasts deeper in,
for what thing ever ended in itself?
And then I look up and it is Brooklyn. 

ii.
Longing is our desire to posses 
not just what we had but the circumstance
in which we had it, Spinoza writes,
and might have added—as if we ever 

had it. New York’s sun is Scotland’s, and in 
Scotland a prairie sun burns through, 
and all my melancholy is only 
futile wanting’s bruise. Give me back

my own sadness, the demon at the edge 
of town, and let me keep everything that is
happening now. Let me bring these apples 
into old age, carry them past death—

I'll eat them in heaven. Let me pull 
from my bag this being here, feeling
what’s been felt for a thousand years 
and never gotten to the bottom of.