Thursday, June 14, 2007

A FLUCTUATION

A fluctuation in the cosmic void,

a wink of atoms,

a fallen eyelash of light,

the seeing of a lifetime

nothing but candle vapour,

ghost-water on the moon,

the exhalation of a vagrant star

looking for its lost constellation

like a berry or a gem

that had wandered offroad

from the vine of a crown.

The eye that regards all

as it rises like a blue mystic sun

over the morning eyelids

of the remote hills

waking up in the arms of their shadows

demands exposure of the sky,

a clarity pure enough for stars

as it turns the day over

like the palm of a hand

to reveal how our lifestreams

join and break

at the junction of sacred rivers.

And the vision,

the illusion of the way I see life,

the romantic intoning

into the bell of the abyss

for a hopeless beauty that died like a bird,

the lostness and the loneliness,

the unknown sorrow

that seems to bleed out of the air

like a black rose born to grieve

for the separations of long ago,

and the child in the brutal fire

that pleads at a window

weeping in the heat

for rescue from an afterlife without salvation,

all that the heart features

in the deepest silence of the night,

nothing but the auroral trash

of an overionized mind

trying to touch its own burns tenderly.

Until I became the knowing

even my own ignorance

didn’t recognize me.

Until I vastly improved

the integrity of my lies,

every mirror I looked into

like a woman’s eyes

was corrupt,

the prelude to a death certificate

in lipstick, a thorn of honey

that dripped like the fangs of the moon

with mysterious toxins and elixirs

that could scald and bleach the heart

or restore it with the kiss of a silver herb

grown in the garden of a cool eclipse.

My bitterness and fear

have made me less susceptible

to the empty boats that arrive

to take me on like some kind of foreign export,

a cargo of ashes and stars,

the bodybags

of the casualties and refugees

that perished in an unknown holy war of one

that I can’t stop waging

against a universe that won’t let me in,

but my solitude

could defeat me with a feather,

could shock the fool I am to hide

with the shadow of a wing

breaking the spell of this birdless sky

that seems to go on forever beyond the wind

like a caravan of rain

that’s outwalked the longest known road

into a wilderness

of rootless trees in big city back alleys.

When the rose

has been stripped down to its claws and horns,

how few have the eyes

to keep yearning.

Let me drown in tears of fire,

in wells of thoughtful quicksand,

rack me on the iron in my blood

and stub my cherished stars out

like angry pincers applied to my feet

like a firewalk through a snakepit

and I will confess to nothing

but an earnest ignorance,

I will not betray the abyss

where I buried myself like nuclear waste.

I will remain true

to the merciless emptiness

I uttered to myself like a vow

I didn’t know if I could keep

four decades ago.

Now I lay my head down to dream

on a stone pillow full of stars

that shine like rare metals in the night,

and when I wake

I seem to know less

about everything it took me a lifetime to master

than when I first

abandoned my eyes

like oceans on the moon to see.

PATRICK WHITE

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