AFRAID TO BE ALIVE SOMETIMES

Afraid to be alive sometimes, not

anything horrific, but something

chronically unnerving in the air,

the slight trace of emotive plutonium,

a whisper of scales in the grass.

Most of my life I have laboured

to discover the importance of my inconsequence,

so I’m never certain of what it is I fear I might lose,

or is my survival merely the appendix of a habit

evolution is too booked to remove?

I’m fifty-nine, sixty soon, vigorously old,

and still fascinated by the subtleties of my lust,

the strange script it writes in the sand and the stars,

how often the needles of a viper have served

as my only compass in the incredible lostness,

or, more rarely, how the highest and the lowest

sprout from the snake like wings

until I cry the cinder of the dragon

out into more expansive skies

than can be sampled by my eyes

on the riverbank of my own cremation.

I love the suggestibility of words,

the auroral picture-music

that falls from the shoulders of the abyss,

but more, what they cannot, do not say.

I live among the fallen cornerstones of a mystery

that has accorded me breath and name enough

to know I am alive here on earth awhile

even if my heart rows like a lifeboat on the moon

toward the ubiquitous shore of its own boundlessness,

or a love-letter slipped under the door of an island like water.

And who am I to say it should be different,

when the clarity of what cannot be known

is brighter than that which can?

I breathe the world in and I breathe the world out

and everywhere my mystic specificity

is the whole of everything;

and when nothing is mine

I take a dark delight in the ageless intimacy

of celebrating the sacred unattainability of being anything,

and everything is inspiration, is the sea in the low place

receiving all her rivers without discrimination.

Of all the blessings that have been accorded me,

of all the days and nights that have amazed me into being,

this is the holiest heresy, the dark jewel in the eye of the light

that goes looking for it, illuminating worlds within worlds

like wildflowers and the maverick hubcaps of the moon

that have freed themselves of the wheel along the way.

PATRICK WHITE