AND IT’S BEEN SUCH A LONG TIME

And it’s been such a long time

since my heart were anything other

than a way of bobbing

to keep my head above water.

I stare at things until they scare me

because that’s the only time I feel

my blood and my head come together

wholly in the moment,

and I refuse to turn a grail quest into a hobby.

Like the moon I have been denuding myself for years

to know who I am, skin by skin, sky by sky,

believing the daughter of my mystic specificity is clarity.

I have been a thirsty fountain

and held my mouth open to the stars like rain,

and even without witness, without companion, in the dark

trusted the way of the seeing wherever it led,

trusted that it worked transformations in the nature of things,

trusted that if I looked deeply and eloquently

into the terrors, and sorrows, and joys of things,

the haemmorage of gold in the side of the mountain,

removed like a bullet, or the agony of the one-winged dragonfly

that spins in the dust like a wounded helicopter,

because these are how my humanity

keeps on happening, and there is no

inner or outer to hinge your door on in a dream

even when the rocks believe they’re awake,

nor any other evidence that I’m alive.

Each knows the world

by the colour and sound and touch and form of the other,

and if you’ve never seen how all the oceans

flow down into a single tear,

you’ve never really cried.

Who doesn’t look up at night

to see if they’re still shining?

PATRICK WHITE