The Inner Gate

JON ANDERSON

THE INNER GATE

After all, what is writing

but controlled dreaming

BORGES

At a certain time of my life

that failure I had long before surmised,

which was a destiny born

of self-consciousness, assured itself.

I felt I had been walking aimlessly

between shops & houses, along

narrow cobbled sidewalks,

turning corners as they occurred

in a Mediterranean city.

Passing its stained fountains,

galleries,

gates behind which were narrow yards

full of flowers & washing,

I had lost track of memory.

Out of my longing

I had invented this particular city.

Within its heart

a house,

a room,

a diary of aesthetic change.

Though I had seldom mentioned within it

those events or names by which

I was compelled to write,

I had secretly thought to accrue a life:

to imply

the passage of time.

Of myself, as citizen, from here to here.

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I became coldly hysterical.

I attempted. some small injuries. Scraping

my forearm against the rough stucco of a house-front,

my blood speckled it a dull brown,

the color of old tintypes.

This regulated motion enraged me.

Even the pain grew melancholy

with its obsessive pulse.

I thought of picking a fight,

or entering a shop to bring my fist

crashing down on its display case:

I saw a hand rising

through brooches & rings, to meet my hand

in the shadowy glass.

I realized I would remember

only my conception, not the act.

The man who would beat me was already recognized.

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Perhaps I was stunned; my mind,

which seemed now to have conceived even itself,

would not function beyond

a certain repetition:

I saw myself, seated at a desk

in a small room, rise

from writing again & again.

My vision, with each rising of the figure,

crossed by inches the plain wood floor,

the desk on which a journal

lay open, toward a window.

The room,

its furniture & bare white walls,

lay otherwise in shadow.

I did not know if I was waking, or passing

deeper into an obsessive dream;

I could see the light, sloped roofs of the city,

& below, a courtyard,

high-walled & windowless but for my own.

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Then I began walking.

I felt the eyes of others watching, as if,

among these streets,

these pastel store fronts & shades of my making,

I was recognizeably foreign.

As I turned corner after corner

my anxiety steadied

to a form of relaxed pursuit.

I found myself following a group of men;

among them, one

who in a former life,

before the nets or mirrors had descended

upon all motion of history,

I had seen as my future.

That is, in his comfortable,

terrible submission to the traps of the familiar,

I had seen my own progression.

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One by one these men dissolved into doorways.

The afternoon grew less hot.

In my singularity of following

I was relieved, & seemed carried

on a small boat down those blue, winding streets,

often in the shadows of trees.

He turned at the heavy iron gate

of an alley, touched

his remaining friends' shoulders,

& entered.

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So I had made my way,

which was after all by chance, & effortless.

As I passed from gate to inner gate

& into a high-walled yard,

my bitterness ripened. Standing in the flowers

below his window,

I watched as he ate & read;

I watched the narrow passage of stars

as his light went out.

If he had stepped outside

I might have strangled him,

only to see his face fill with blood.

I desired a single, terrible event,

the passage from which would measure time.

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On a stone bench, beneath a tree,

a man is smoking.

He sits in a patience of shadows

above which the stars turn slowly.

Now the first wheels rumble

over cobblestone. An awning

is lowered.

Shopkeepers shade their faces from the sun.

And if, this morning,

I should turn & touch your face

or caress your throat lightly,

as if in love...

this is not love, but care.

Yours is the world

I dream in when I fail to dream.

e

These are the raptures of falling in space forever.