Wilderness

I breathed of the wild man’s air,
and I knew a little more than I should:
somewhere above they kept folding a fire
until all that remained was a rose,
poured the sky into the ears of dreamers
and they saw the unutterable depths
that love hides behind its poetry of light,
and time was a withering storm,
and time was a mist giving birth
to the tree of forgetting of good and evil.
I had not desired to go so far, past
forgetting where I had begun, but this
river flowed so quietly, as if time
were turning backwards, as if wondering
were logic, and I always thought
I would return, I would return,
did not understand that home, too,
traveled through the years you were away,
and returning was to desire a place
that never had been as you envisioned.
Why had I ever believed I knew
where all these roads go? I made myself
an oracle of my thousand defeats
when I sat in silence, and let
the wind decide where I would journey.
And now, in this familiar wilderness,
I wondered at the wild man:
I knew that he was such a one not
ever to forget where his treasure was,
for he kept nothing but wisdom.