The Travel Writer

Where he was was not where he thought he was,
And not where he belonged, where he wanted to be;
Unhappy among the ignorant, the unenlightened,
He craved the most arduous journey, the strictest ordeal,
The true initiation into the kerygma,
The secret gospel of the hooded saint within.
The Other was his twinland, his origin and destination,
Where arrival and departure were as one,
And looking was a kind of death and resurrection,
The starburst of freedom in the eye of God.
He became the Adam of semantics, the namer of things,
The bridegroom in white linen at the altar,
And the hierophant in the secret shrine’s gloom,
Lighting the final candle to witness the revelation;
Jealous of the earth he trod, he hallowed his own footsteps,
Denouncing rivals as fools and impostors
To whom the true religion was forever denied,
While he, the ghost beside the empty sarcophagus,
Had come so far only to read his first footstep’s glyph.
Was adventure not the brother of understanding?
Was hardship not the witness of truth?
It was time to write his own story in blood,
To imagine himself as he had always yearned to be,
To sacrifice coarse flesh to the astral body,
And wend to the centre by the spiral of days.
His life became the lost hours’ rebellion,
The stranger’s sermon at the waterfall in the oasis,
The desert horseman’s gallop into the dying sun;
In his clenched fist he brought home a pebble
To show the foreigners at his native hearth,
A phoenix feather snatched from the whispering air.
The fatherland was sick with nameless disease,
But he might be the cure, the unicorn’s horn
Applied to the wound, if he could find himself first,
If he could find the crystal castle and be admitted;
His ancestors would teach him forgotten wisdom,
And stand him at the circle’s centre once again,
Where up and down and inside and out were one.
Thought and action were the bread and wine
Of the Holy Mass, the transubstantiation of time,
As restless passion carried him outwards and on,
Ever seeking the strange, the undiscovered,
In danger of losing his compass and coming adrift,
Lost beyond his despairing mother’s sobbing call;
Only he who had squared the circle would survive,
And make his old age the throne and sceptre
Of the perfect man, the hero crowned for his endeavours,
Uniting mind and body, art and science, life and death.
Dream and contemplation were his guides beyond,
As he learned the methods of memory to roam at will
In the infinite, living whole centuries in an instant,
Revisiting past incarnations in distant space and time,
To purge lingering evils and turn matter into spirit.
Now there was no safety in the senses, no illusion,
But signs and symbols of the divine, in every quarter,
And beyond the mountains, on the scented isle of birds,
The golden child on the seashore laughed and sang