Going Clear

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.