"I Kept A Journal For Years... "(Part Five) Poem by Daniel Brick

Eidolons by Walt Whitman

And thee my soul,
Joys, ceaseless exercises, exaltations,
Thy yearning amply fed at last, prepared to meet,
Thy mates, eidolons.

Thy very songs not in thy songs,
No special strains to sing, none for itself,
But from the whole resulting, rising at last, and floating,
A round full-orb'd eidolon.

I kept a journal for years,
sometimes treating it like a diary
of everyday life, as if I were storing
minutiae for some over zealous historian
of the common life. Other times I wrote
abstruse passages meant to penetrate
the meaning of these times. The journal
is no longer itself, it is a symbol
whose possible and probable meanings
spread widely through space and time,
already beyond my ken. But not beyond
my soul's need and interest and curiosity.
I ascend to the third-story room
in my apartment and see the real world,
perhaps only a small vista of its immensity
but still it is a genuine place of trees,
shrubs, lawn grass, and humble creatures
who are my neighbors. But as I read my books,
write my poems, think my thoughts,
I become obscurely aware of openings, cracks
in what passes for solidity, corridors of light
summoning me to the other side of things. It is
a mystic calling and I am certainly ready for it.
If I sense my eyes blurring after a long night
of reading and thinking, I can only imagine
the clarity of my spiritual vision, which hastens
to balance the doubleness of experience. Inner and
Outer mirror each other, Life and Death complete
each other, Music and Silence exchange their arts.
And now we sense the rightness of Walt Whitman's
paradox:

Ever the mutable,
Ever materials, changing, crumbling, re-cohering,
Ever the ateliers, the factories divine,
Issuing eidolons.