NOTHING. NO ONE.

Nothing. No one. I am

not

and the world pours in.

Collaborative creativity:

it makes me it

as I make it me.

I have aged like space

and my body

still tastes of a mind,

and there is always a darkness

in the bloodwine

that moves like the fin

of a dangerous eclipse.

Words are a blind man

trying to see a star

through a braille telescope.

A starmap

doesn’t give birth to planets

and the shining of the light that breathes

in a darkness vaster than death

is the eloquent subtlety

of the silence that articulates the silence.

All these stars

stirred like spoonfuls of sugar

to sweeten the abyss

that still astonish me

after all these years

remain an extravagance beyond comprehension,

a radiant gate

as wide and open as this universe

that has sponsored my eyes

out of its own pocket

to see it turning like a jewel in its own light

so intensely

that the staggering sum of these myriad brilliant worlds

seem no more than a vapour,

a warm breath on a cold night,

a foment of gnats on the evening air,

compared to the mystery of the awareness

that it is so.

One clear, effacing insight

into the oceanic intimacy of the unknown

and all the wisdom of the world

is a snowflake in a furnace,

a hummingbird in a black hole.

On this echoless stage

the metaphors audition like comets

for existence,

for the merest hint of their likeness

to that inconceivability,

even knowing they’re a bridge

across a river

with only one shore

and between the flowers

and the stars they feed themselves to,

there is only one mouth

and the language they use

to summon their names

isn’t chained to a voice.

PATRICK WHITE