Inspired by a poem of same title
by William Stafford
What’s in My Journal?
Highly wrought notes
of discontent--
ungrateful children,
husbands, colleagues--
their slack performances
portrayed with cinematic flourish.
A messy tableau of anecdotes,
occasional self-immolations
rescued by exuberant affirmations:
There's magic when you’re not afraid!
Moods of rapture but also
a tiresome focus on death,
mine especially.
Bursts of discovery:
Sand pebbles made of crushed bones, shells,
no two exactly alike!
The incomprehensibility of everything:
What am I but clumps of wildly spinning atoms?
And questions: Why only two genders?
The search for consolation,
for understanding,
trails of failed attempts,
of early understandings,
evolving understandings,
riotous misunderstandings,
and despair
of ever understanding.
Dismay the mind is immaterial:
nothing solid in here, nothing tangible
and so totally prey to chemistry.
Protestations about life,
about this sea of chaos,
about the absence
of a universal moral code.
A fractured collage of memories
I never tire of:
full moons, shimmery seas,
snow peaks.
Much recanting, anxious dips
into redemptive fantasy:
A divine creator?
And blessed moves into mindfulness:
I am the universe and it is me.
But mostly, unconnected thoughts
that struggle
to connect
for decades,
verbatim,
but always
peter out.
