Poetry in Search of the Way

Treat this poem as a palimpsest,
paper carefully chosen, a bark
harvested in the heights of Nepal
by women who cannot read it.

Lucky paper, tricky paper,
the original intent
incompletely scraped away
after appearing so mysteriously.

How?  The way a sculptor works?
By seeing something in the block
of marble, praying for the revelation,
an artist’s intuition darkly dreamed?

Did the original mind
of the palimpsest
see something in the page,
something from beyond?

As you hold this up to your clever lens,
walking around it as a pedestrian
in the sculpture hall of a museum,
what logic wanders through the pathways

roped with velvet?  Insomnia
is irrational, a force
seizing us like Schopenhauer’s Will.
To get a hold of it

we must make it mean something.
This takes no more than a decision
to stay up all night.
I wrote this

because I had to.
I tried to stay up
and I did.
I tried not to stay up

and I did.
So nothing worked.
I am alone
in a never ending night

calling to be set free
from an encasement
in endless echoes,
so empty I put walls of superficial stone

on every side.