YOU CAN WEAR THE STARS

You can wear the stars like tatoos when space is your ultimate skin. Or maybe they’re genes, macroverse Pax6 Hox genes, all those aeons of light just to position your eyes. How small I am. How irrelevant. Flux. Flow. Fusion. Fission. Where the saltwater meets the fresh, in the primordial atom, was it a flowering out or a coming apart, particle or wave, or is the question as stupid as asking if water can drown? And there’s no point in trying to climb the logarithm of the profundity of my unknowing. The moon is fine where it is. Or I’m a lump of boorish, pasty, wadded matter masticated into a cud of grass and grazer, doomed to be transformed through seven stomachs. And it’s not likely that a blade of grass fed in at one end is going to be pulled out a feather at the other. Or maybe I’m just spooked a bit by time. Or there’s nothing more meaningless than a meaningful life. Anyway, why exhaust yourself like a fly at the pane of the sky, trying to swim through glass, harping on the incommensurable stations of your transformation into a repeating decimal? Values and meanings, but who interprets the interpreters? And there are sediments of metaphor under the river bottom, pages and pages of hidden icons like the fossils of covert programmes that boot me up every morning. And viruses that spam my thinking with artificial erections. So I resort to words the way a dam resorts to run-offs. I leak out of myself like the sea in a bag of skin to avoid being punctured by my own insights like the doll of a darker magic. How can the mindstream neglect its maritime ablutions? Black sail, white sail. Easy enough to understand. But what if, standing here on your headland, you spot one that’s striped, or grey? If the curse and the blessing are blurred? Or worse. My third eye needs glasses? Was love the first mover of life, or does life have a black agenda for love of its own? Two lungs of the same hourglass breathing sand in and out. And the whole of my life, a mirage in a desert. Who needs to go looking for a broom to sweep it away?

PATRICK WHITE