THIS FLUX AND FUSION

This flux and fusion of thought and emotion

that flows through me like the wind at night

through a window wider than space,

this auroral lifelight that flares through me

illuminated by what it illumines,

that moves as if it doesn’t know me

like the widening wake of a phantom ship

absorbed in the resonant musings of the fog,

as if the blood didn’t know the body,

or the stream the life of the banks

it nourishes and reflects,

this incessant carding and unravelling

of currents, clouds, and tides

looming and undoing the tapestry of the moon

without revealing the whole of what it weaves

as if the only eye of the visions it conceives

were the womb of the cauldron that stirred it into being,

and I no more than a sigh of smoke

that stains the clarity

of the flame that burns beneath it,

the vagrant afterlife of something unconsumed,

this night, this light, this life

of fireflies, lightning, eclipses, and stars

is the disembodied voice of the mystery

that proposes there’s a me

below the salt

at the foot of the mountain

that everything flows down to

like a tear in the ocean of the eye that nears the sea.

And how should a man follow himself

like a lantern through the dark

when it’s the road that shows the way,

the eye that guides the star,

the blood that maps out the veins and arteries

and fashions this terminal of a heart

like a town or a station

at a crucial junction of the journey

to facilitate its arrivals and departures?

I have stood on this platform for years

without any luggage,

scanning the faces that come and go

to see if one might prompt me into knowing

who it is that greets them with farewell

as if I were the occasion

that summoned them like a leaf on the flowing

and they were the unmastered familiar

that casts me back upon myself

like the spell of my own seeing,

or this binge of being

that draws me up from my own watersheds

to sit down on the earth with it like a well

under the intimate influence of a willow at night

and drink from the eyes of my own face

like seas that have long eluded the moon,

ebbing and neaping alike,

strange intimates

of this cup that we share like a bell.

PATRICK WHITE