Sixteen

In those moments alone, so often in the dark,
watching Buster Keaton or L'Atalante or
The Third Man, or paging slowly through
Robert Frank's Americans or Eggleston's
Guide or The Golden Bough, or listening on
headphones in his bedroom to the records
he bought from the cut-out bin at Osco Drug
or brought home from the Public Library,
--Ornette Coleman, Thelonious Monk, Sun Ra,
Link Wray, Howlin' Wolf, Captain Beefheart,
Dr. John, Tonight's the Night, Charley Patton,
Jimmie Rodgers, The Anthology of American
Folk Music, many of which struck him as exactly
the sort of strangeness he was desperately looking
for, and which he loved initially and purely for that
strangeness; weird was good enough, he wanted
simply different-- he couldn't have known, and
certainly didn't know, that in those moments
the world was changing forever, or that what until
then he had understood as the world was being
obliterated, and that what he was experiencing
was not simply pleasure, but a process of becoming
the person he could not not be, a person who would
never be happy unless every door he opened
revealed five more doors, behind which were ten
doors, on and on into an impossible future, until he
was finally faced with more doors than he could ever
hope to open, and this realization, and the suspicion
that if he could just keep opening these doors,
if he had enough time (which he knew, he knew,
he knew he did not), he might one day, finally,
stumble into a room that had the one missing
thing he'd been looking for his entire life, an answer
to what it had all meant, and why he had been
claimed, and hectored by such a scattershot and
ruinous obsession to follow every single river,
every creek, every trickling stream to its origin,
rather than to the sea, where he might have found
a boat, paddled until he was at peace, and let it all go.