AND LOVE CAUGHT

And love caught by the gills in the mesh of human need, and the storm outside a leaden drummer sick of war, and flesh and rock the same, and the eye no more than water, and mud no less than the spirit, and the heart in the hollow of its own hands, a lifeboat that failed, an attempt that floundered, a rescue that failed, and everything beyond right and wrong, no river mapping itself, every direction, the thorn of a rose, the fang of a coiled compass, the black toxicity of depleted stars, and no one to surrender to, no victor, no victim, no vanguished, everything the metaphysics of sand and salt, dead leaves and brittle seaweed, lost bolts to crucial connections, a graveyard of windows, and every step forward a return to what was never left, a knot that grows by doubling back on itself until it’s stopped by the eye of the needle, and the only thing left to burn, this bouquet of unanswered love-letters, the rain comes down steady on the yellow leaves through the milky windows and the sky is a mass of ashes. And I concede there are jewels on the vines of the fire, and not all razorblades mistake themselves for eyelids and supple petals, and there are fingertips that haven’t been dipped in acid, and sometimes the robin mauled by the cat gets away with the worm to fill the satchels of its young, and that everything that is must in some way be confounded by its own intelligence, even the atoms somehow separate from everything, and birfurcated reality, conciousness, a matter of split ends, peeling propositions like dead skin off propositions about life to understand nothing, and the general spontaneity prevails like a camp counsellor with a bow and a target, and there is only a you and an I when the bridge has been washed away, and there are rivers that drink too much and flow sideways over their banks like sailors on the deck of a squall, and one stone hits another like hearts trying to free a spark over a tinder of straw to survive the cold of the cave they will paint like a womb with inception, and every astronomical catastrophe is only a random blow to the gut that makes the stars go flat and panics and baffles the next breath, and what could my pain and sorrow be to a mountain on Mars, or a frog in the mouth of a snake, and no book ever sipped wine from the pressed flowers between the shales of its erudition, and nothing I know can help me die enough to be free of this moment, and there’s no point sending a wound from door to door recruiting ghosts as blood donors when the rose has already leaked out of itself like a flag or the poppy of a colour-blind matador falling on the horns of an iron bull like the balloon of a punctured child, and the silence that hovers over everything like vultures and angels is louder than the scream of a mouthless wind in a crematorium cooking the marrow in the bones of a dead mime trying to teach death to talk; I concede to all of it, the dull, stupid futility of a vision that tastes like glue on the tongue of an empty envelope that once was filled with stars posted like light and rain to an urgent sky and let the amber of reason flow over me like the bitter honey of a stalled traffic light and its exudings harden into a glass eye I can use for a paperweight in the rare editions library of the unopened letters of resignation I keep addressing to myself like a poor man’s copyright, sick of mining the ore of dead flies for gold. PATRICK WHITE