A suggestion to myself for dark times - poem

Sierra, July-August, 1992 by John Daniel

Late in the night when nowhere I can walk leads out of sadness, when everything I've done seems wrong, or not enough, what can I lose if I leave the lights I've been living by and go to a place where the land lies flat and clear, where the luminous Milky Way ranges specked and glittering across the sky.

The faint abundance of that distant fire falls around me everywhere - so there I'll walk, walk a long time out among those stars until I'm not so sure in their wild light just where I am or where it was I started, until the shimmering cosmos burns so bright that it seems I am that fire and always was, gathering and drifting in dark distance, and the fire seethed once in a whirling cloud and the cloud was me, it was me taking form in the spew and surge of molten torrents, then cooling, heavy, as the great rains fell, it was me holding still when wind on water was all that moved, and me that stirred, a speck in the deeps where hot vents flowed, and the speck splitting away was also me, and all those slippery surfaces as I changed a million times, churning tail, fins, and gills, the mouth that first sucked air was mine, mine were the feet that found their way, that carried my shifting and shifting self, ears alert, eyes looking out across the land, up at the far-strewn brilliance of night - I have walked this far, I was never lost, my own forgotten face is what I see.