IF YOU KNOW HOW TO LIVE

If you know how to live

you can live more in the name of a little

than you can in the name of much.

The autumn windfall of the great tree

first aspired in the seed

whose ultimate achievement was always itself.

When the world stops being solid

and turns real,

when space thaws

and the glass tears you shed

like chandeliers

of fanatical water

are restored like jewels to a crown,

stars to the afterlife of a legend,

you can walk on the holy book

of the fallen leaves

without giving offense,

you can rise in the morning

like a throne for the homeless.

I have overcome the illusion

of knowing who I am

and when I look at the better part

of the sixty years behind me,

they’re a maze of gates

I left open

when I wandered out of the yard forever.

Now I don’t know

who this is, or where, or when

and there’s a big keyhole in space

where my face used to be

and even my blood flows and unwinds

as if it were being washed away in the rain.

I’ve always felt

there was a flower or a planet within me

trying to bloom,

an opalescent effulgence of light

urging me more expansively into the open

until I disappear like a bird

into the abyss

without beginning and end

that drives the stars

beyond their thresholds of shining

to turn their wands of light upon themselves

and open their eyes like waterlilies

to the mystery of their own radiance.

Sometimes just being here

is so much of nothing

I am silently astounded

by the dark abundance of the emptiness.

The hearing is not in the ear,

the seeing is not in the eye,

and the saying is not in the voice,

and whether you take

wine or water or fire for a guide,

you will never find your spirit

in this leaking bag of a body

until you blow out the lantern

of the nightwatchman

who keeps looking for you like a thief.

PATRICK WHITE