The Proximate Shore

It starts in sadness and bewilderment, The self-reflexive iconography Of late adolescence, and a moment When the world dissolves into a fable Of an alternative geography Beyond the threshold of the visible. And the heart is a kind of mute witness, Abandoning everything for the sake Of an unimaginable goodness Making its way across the crowded stage Of what might have been, leaving in its wake The anxiety of an empty page. Thought abhors a vacuum. Out of it came A partially recognizable shape Stumbling across a wilderness, whose name, Obscure at first, was sooner or later Sure to be revealed, and a landscape Of imaginary rocks and water And the dull pastels of the dimly lit Interior of a gymnasium. Is art the mirror of its opposite, Or is the world itself a mimesis? This afternoon at the symposium Someone tried to resurrect the thesis That a poem is a deflected sigh. And I remembered a day on a beach Thirty-five years ago, in mid-July, The summer before I left for college, With the future hanging just out of reach And constantly receding, like the edge Of the water floating across the sand. Poems are the fruit of the evasions Of a life spent trying to understand The vacuum at the center of the heart, And for all the intricate persuasions They enlist in the service of their art, Are finally small, disappointing things. Yet from them there materializes A way of life, a way of life that brings The fleeting pleasures of a vocation Made up of these constant exercises In what still passes for celebration, That began in a mood of hopelessness On an evening in a dormitory Years and years ago, and seemed to promise A respite from disquietude and care, But that left only the lovely story Of a bright presence hanging in the air.