AND IT SADDENS ME

And it saddens me, drowns me in the hopeless waters of the moon, to remember the passions that died like bruised orchards at my feet, and recollect the startled approximations of the days I thought I should have lived like an englightened dunce in the corner, grinning like a park bench at every passer-by, even in the moist silence of the storm that is now approaching, sit like a conscientious objector under a strategic tree circled like a date by lightning, a bridge in the way of the flashfloods that keep wiping me out like the lean smile of the first crescent off the face of the river. I no sooner get the teeth and the stones of my last demolition straightened with braces, my rosary of abandoned planets rebeaded, and I’m washed out to sea again like a alphabet that hasn’t got a word for mercy or an eye for its own survival, a why for its sudden demise. And there is no buoyancy in the diurnal heart that sinks like the keystone of my solar arch that has ever turned into a faith I could float on my bloodstream. I just keep rolling the rocks back up the hill, hoping somehow I’m happy I’m not an avalanche of windfall asteroids, dog-eared, pitted fruit shaken to the core from an unpruned branch of gravity, the abused leftovers of a stellar reformation, the slagheap of a creekbed creation that pans my tears for gold, though all my options are open from radioactive slurry to the wine of a purified ore. I don’t expect any grace from the agenda of a day that sharks the hour with shadows and fins, regatas of slooped sundials hinged to a halt by noon. It’s enough to be a wall sometimes that isn’t wailing for the deconstruction of a temple that stood like a hammer of peace on the meteoritic cranium of a pummeled hill. And what’s the point of slinging planets around the sun to keep the word of a promised land when there are no giants in residence at all? Better to keep on picking prophetic skulls of lettuce with the migrant Mexicans who work like monarch butterflies than try to revive the vertebrae and bones of these dinosaur aqueducts that went extinct all over the moon waiting for water to spring from the rock like the dolphins of their leaping arches and cry. PATRICK WHITE