Setting Out for the Inner as the Outer Sets in
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Here is late in the August afternoon; Now is a point along this unpaved way Far past where there'd be any more crossroads To come upon and consider—let alone A real fork in the path where, shuddering With power, responsibility and naked Vulnerability commingled, he Could really "choose" to head on one new course Or another—to blow the Horn, or don The Cape of Good Hope, say. Now, past the point Midway between the from and the far to, The place from which the path can seem to bend Through some dimension for which there's no new Co-ordinate, he can see from and to As one, without yet seeing any real Resemblance at all. That way and this, High road and low, into the outback, then In front of what is next—a sea of bubbles, Forest of sorrows, mount of disappointment, And stretched below it the wide plains inane Where all is tweedle and all dumb and dee . . .
What is one's own way, after all? At this Sharp mental point now he can only claim The right to know that he'll somehow be left— Taken over by what he'd undertaken— Upended in just where he'd ended up.
John Hollander, the author of seventeen volumes of poetry and eight volumes of literary criticism, has been awarded over his long career the Bollingen Prize, the Levinson Prize, and a MacArthur Foundation Fellowship. A former chancellor of the Academy of American Poets, Hollander will publish with Knopf in 2008 a new book of poems, A Draft of Light, that includes the three poems in this issue.
