NO ONE

No one has freedom of choice

because choice isn’t necessary.

But that doesn’t mean

you are not free to choose.

Look at the leaf in the window,

turning. Is it choosing

what’s best for it; is it deciding

to bask in the radiance

that charms it like a shy snake,

or could it be,

because there is no separation,

not the severance of an eyelash between them,

that the light and the leaf

are all one continuous action,

the leaf, like the muscle of my arm,

embodying the light

that doesn’t just illuminate the world,

but creates, stirs, and sustains it out of itself

and makes many mouths, many eyes, many people,

one life? Each of us

the light of the world

and its only creator,

as we walk in the garden

musing like tides

among the flowers

that open their hands like oceans,

and realize in silence, in blood, in seeing,

in the prelude of the first word

that announced the world into being,

we are the herald, the trumpet and the echo

of that beginning, that saying,

we are the said and the unsaid of everything,

and there’s no need

to select heartbeats, no need

to grow a second head

and split the snake like a thread of hair

you’re jabbing into the eye of a needle

to patch a sky on a sky that doesn’t need mending,

no need to look upon yourself

like a tear that disappears like a bird

in the incredible outpouring of your vastness

as if the otherness of it all,

the dark matter, the dark energy

the dark gate that mothers the light,

and blinds it,

were not also you

as your dreams and nightmares are,

as the blood that grew out of you,

above and below,

like a rose in the garden is.

Do as you wish. Let it go. Or let it stop you;

But the moment you choose the choosing,

you will look upon yourself

the way a woman late at night alone,

wearing a deserted face,

looks upon a knife

by the sink

under the kitchen window.

PATRICK WHITE