HOW SEVERE I AM

How severe I am with myself, as if I inflicted little pains to obviate the wound of the moon in my side. Love’s a broken mast and a torn sail in a tide. I say it with the absolute precision of a scalpel in a teaching hospital. I say it like a stake I’ve just hammered into the hands of the mountain I’m climbing. I say it like a door slamming on my own fingers. Because, because, because, love goes on leaving long after it left like all the different phases of the moon unveiling its spectral lament. The sunlight smashes its goblet on a wave, the musical rain of the windchimes gets hopelessly tangled in the lines of its own parachute and the nightjump to paradise is caught without a reserve. The poppy shop runs out of milk and the discrete addictions of dreams I never even knew I had, go into withdrawal. The rungs of a ladder are confused for the spokes of a wheel and everybody leaves on crutches. Cynical. Too neatly aphoristic. Blood rushing to a contusion as if it were a scar. The truth lies less flamboyantly elsewhere like the unseen radiant of all these kissing stones that pummel me like meteors into building them each a Kaaba where the sun was, that they might be circumambulated for a change, even if I alone am the only pilgrim, the solitary hajji to throw pebbles at the demon who shadows their shrines. I hurl the Kaaba every now and then like a brick at the mirror of my own reflection, just to see if I can dispel these memories that rise up in me like the perennial flags of exile lowered like the moon to half mast. Out of the blue, the ether, the zeitgeist, I am assailed by sudden flashes of zeal for the lost innocence of some moment, isolated in time, arrested like a penny from the flow of current inconsequence, some triviality of tenderness that refuses to believe it was ever estranged from its own afterlife, and refuses to go. As if the onceness of the flame could never be occluded by the ashes of the poem. But what poor creatures, we, who must change to endure, and adapt as we can to our perishing, improvising as we go, these antics and gestures of a life to flesh out the parts we play to a terrible vigilance. Then doused like torches in the eye of the night, as if the seeing wanted to make amends by its own effacement for intimately posing as us. The mirror’s indifferent to the loyalty of the face that always looks in on it. And even in fragments, it isn’t the face that cuts. Though all the paths and the woes, the ways and the roads, the bad guesses, the curses and blessings, the scaldings, the sugars, and the acids, have long ago settled into the journalistic shales of time like the old slug lines of another heart breaking event, it’s still as if we touched something more than ourselves some nights, as if the stars in the corners of our eyes that didn’t dazzle us, their shining subtler and more sublime, were to suddenly flare in the cold daylight long after the warm nights we sloughed like skin were done. But let the river keep to the banks of its old grim scriptures as it will. Me? It’s always been more than enough to drown in the transfusive drop of the occasional beatitude, my whole life flashing before me in tears.

PATRICK WHITE