DEEP IN THE COUNTRY

for Alysia on Valentine’s Day

with all my love

Deep in the country,

stepping out from a dark winter grove

like a lost punctuation mark

onto the blank page

of the field that opens me up like space

to the radiant intimacy

of thousands of stars

busy with being me and the universe,

I am shocked by the sudden brilliance.

The wind is a downed powerline

whipping like a wounded snake

across the ghostly ice-glaze.

And my spirit delights

in the freedom of my insignificance,

and for a few minutes of perfect stillness

that exceed even the peace and wonder of the vision

my heart is not the burnt cradle

of things that never came to be,

not a rock I hurled like a meteor

at my own face

in the window of the sky

to shatter what looked back at me,

but the ore of a secret assent

to the magnificence.

I wonder about my life sometimes,

whether it’s amounted to anything

more than gum under a desk

in an abandoned schoolhouse,

and a deep sadness

grows like a bell in my stomach,

and I feel impeached

in a congress of falsehoods

for toying with the truth

that I am the self-proclaimed king of quicksand.

But even that denuding,

even tearing the universe off my shoulder

like a chip

or an epaulet

because everything dances

to the tune of yes no maybe so

like a fire that can’t find

any trace of itself

among so many flames,

or the seer among so many eyes,

is the ambivalence

of wandering homeless

through this palace of tears

I grew up in,

doubting the legitimacy

of my succession to the throne.

And then in a flash without prelude

the seven tiny bridges of my vertebrae

span this river of stars

and I am a man

standing alone in a winter field,

looking up at what all humans

have looked up at from the beginning,

one foot planted either side

of a shoreless abyss

as their lives were dispersed

on the cold, night air

to mingle like a ghost

with this vapour of stars

and not know what breathes them out

or what, by the profound design of chance,

as I am here tonight,

breathes them in.

For thousands of years

like the moon

I have carved masks for a living

and painted them with my blood,

and adorned them with my tears,

but never met the one who wears them,

never looked into the eyes

of the one who holds my faces up to hers

like a fan or a flower or a life

to give form to her non-existence.

Now they lie all around my feet,

like the petals of the black rose

that blooms in her hidden heart

and sheds them like eclipses,

and even as the stars

stream off her hair and skin

as she rises from bathing in the abyss,

though all this beauty startles my eyes,

fills them with a sea of light

and releases them like fish in her waters,

though this is much, still

it is a whisper of nothing

compared to the extinction of seeing I am

when she seizes me like a torch

and plunges me into her blood

and wholly absorbed in her

who is my breath, my pulse, my only sky,

I know in a moment that lasts forever,

she is the one

who has lavished me with the deepest stars

I have ever known,

and even the darkness shines,

even the darkness shines.

PATRICK WHITE