I ONCE KNEW A DOOR-TO-DOOR BUDDHA

I ONCE KNEW A DOOR-TO-DOOR BUDDHA

I once knew a door-to-door buddha

who thought of nothing as the space left

by everything he had lost

and grew so exquisitely refined

he hung himself in a keyhole

with a piece of nirvanically-flavoured dental floss.

We change in ways we never thought we would.

So right now

you are not especially beautiful

and I am not particularly wise or good.

Yesterday, the moon. And today

this egg in a snakepit

debating scales and feathers

as I try to swallow my own tail

up to and including my head

to see if I can disappear

like the tatoo of the dragon

born in the burning mirror

the mercy of the fire sloughs like skin.

Now there’s a scar in the sky

where my face used to be

and the crystal skull I’m drinking from

looks uncannily like me

before I left home like a grave

that wasn’t deep enough to dream in

of all the things I never became.

Right candle. Wrong flame, perhaps,

but I had to make the starmaps up as I went along

like the words to something you sing alone

when your heart’s on fire

and the dead are still flesh and bone.

It was never enough just to see the visions

I wanted to see the eye that saw them,

the black jewel that shone in all directions

like the unwitnessed clarity of the dark light

that engenders the light we go by

and I resolved like diamond

that if I couldn’t be a petty fool like other people

then I would exact my revenge

by aspiring to be a great one.

But that work is done, and now

there’s nothing left of me to be

that isn’t creatively giving and free

so that when I’m listening to your confession

I don’t appoint a jury of fireflies

and call the court into session

as we all rise like the tears in your eyes

asking to be forgiven.

I don’t turn my blood into a flowchart

and point to the north star

like the axis of the evidence

that everything turns on.

I listen to your lies inventively

as your chandeliers crash

like trees and constellations

in an ice-storm all around you

and remembering I once put

the ripples in your earrings

like an apple that fell into the river,

I grow human and warm,

I assume a kinder, more fictitious form

and remove the moon from your eye like a sliver.

PATRICK WHITE