Did you ever go clear?
— Leonard Cohen
I don’t know what it means, just that it costs a lot.
But it reminds me of a frame of mind that visits me
From time to time, in which the world seems mine alone
And the words and feelings for it all belong to me—
A kind of solipsism that isn’t true, but that speaks to me
As it does to you too, whether you realize it or not.
I can’t sustain it anymore and I’ve forgotten how to try.
I don’t know why it’s so important to me, or why the
Peace it gives me makes any difference, since it doesn’t last
And doesn’t matter to anyone else. I only know it’s real,
And that the sense of life it brings from day to day
Is a mixed blessing, a continual exercise in uncertainty
And disillusionment that makes up for what time takes away.
I don’t know how to explain it, and I keep trying to resist it
As it draws me in, a state of mind that keeps trying
To make sense of itself without reaching a conclusion—
Like a journey to nowhere whose goal is a kind of clarity
That doesn’t reveal anything but life at its most human:
This not knowing, this not being sure, this going on.
Excerpted from Cemeteries and Galaxies: Poems by permission of Farrar, Straus and Giroux.