a wave

constancy of a changing self

who we are now is a wave racing toward a beach,
which, while it looks new and of the current,
contains within itself each impulse that made it who it was
at every point it has been,

as my brother died I saw within him the child
who could not understand what was happening,
and the adult who knew and could not talk about it,
except obliquely,

I know within me that who I think I am at heart
fixed somewhere in my twenties,
and I can’t quite get what happened
to the person who looks back at me in the mirror,

it feels like the self I know shifts back and forth a bit
as the multitudes of those within me assert
and a larger me reads a sense of who the group most feels itself to be
at this time in this place for this reason at hand,

what also seems true to me is that the child
somehow has within it the adult,
at each plateau of equilibrium flashes of insight can flare,
they that will come if and when future level after level is achieved,
as if a future self calls out and is heard before it can even be:

all is change, yet, what I feel tonight, is a constancy of self
that changes except in that it is.

by Henry H. Walker
April 9, ’11