Panning for Gold
I wrote this poem during a day hike last summer. I was surprised to come across it again today, while searching through some lyrics on my computer. After reading the poem for the first time in over a year, I was immediately taken back to that balmy summer. Scott was leaving for Brazil, Alex and I didn’t talk much anymore, and nothing was really going the way I had intended. I couldn’t find a job, and every musical endeavor I took on ended in futility. The only effective means that I had found for organizing my thoughts was through poetry. During this time I was reading a great deal of works by Kerouac, Ginsberg, and Carver, and found that their writing compelled me to step outside of the habitual ways of perceiving my surroundings. I felt a sense of release in understanding that everything in this world can be examined from a number of insights. I also came to recognize that wisdom cannot be created. Only life and its incessant diversity can bring you any insight. It is my opinion, and the creative focus of this poem, that we often seek understanding and truth in the wrong places. Wisdom is not knowing; it is perceiving.
Enumerated pathways
weave wicker veins,
stringing together love and hatred,
binding the days into one great vessel.
An empty chest to be filled
with that which is rarely acquired.
Bits and pieces glint,
fool’s gold illusions of veracity
pushing us just close enough
to realize we’ve been
panning in the wrong river.
Chris Algeo
