The Gate of Horn & the Gate of Ivory

Somewhere I read that music was invented to confirm human loneliness.
But from the same source I learned that truth disappears in the telling of it,
and this, spurious as it seemed, since it unwrites what it teaches,
cast doubt on everything else—the same way a mad raving
might come in the same door of the mind as a profound equilibrium,
causing that mathematical proof, though luminous, though true,
to be discarded. And perhaps this is why progress is taking so long.
Too much weight placed on the doors of things, on their beginnings.
How they entered. Why they came. Nothing allowed to
just arrive and sit down, even into the blue district of dreams
nothing immune to this pathological sourcing.
I confess I often used you this way: as a front gate
to the elaborate memory palace I was building,
asking you to stand still as I tried to carve it around us
out of the black granite night of our childhood. This way
every theory, every mood, every image would have to be paraded
through your wide archway first, to see if it was false, before I let it be filed
as something that happened. The shimmers on Boon Lake in the morning
when cartoons were playing. The peanut-butter cups we used to steal
before breakfast. That birch we used to climb, that could not hold us.
You thought I was taking your hand as we fell
but really I needed a coördinate to touch in midair,
to confirm where the ground was.