Monday, October 20, 2008

NOT TO TRANSLATE

NOT TO TRANSLATE


Not to translate the mysticism of contemplation

into the mysticism of action

is to think the baby is so beautiful in the womb

you never let it out to have legs and arms of its own.

At the second full moon in October

the dragon swallows the buddha

but the buddha doesn’t mind.

And there’s a soft warm wind over the wheat

and the road is dusty with stars

that used to be people

and the white sweet clover

raises its wings like a fragrance in the moonlight.

And it isn’t as if you can swim like a fish

through a lull in time like a hole in the net

and get through another constellation

like a fear of life you’d like to forget.

You walk up to yourself

like a gate to a stranger

and drop the latch like a trigger,

your body a sandbag to keep the ocean out.

What do you hope to build

on these cornerstones of doubt

you keep hurling around like meteors

that mistake your eyes for windows?

If only the nod of a random assent

if you weren’t meant to be here

you wouldn’t be

or why when I suggest suicide

do you always prefer apocalypse?

The trouble is, despite appearances,

you’re not dead enough to know

how you’ve always been taken in

by your next breath

and then let go.

The trouble is

you don’t know how

to drink out of your own skull

in the name of anything

without getting a hangover.

The trouble is

you don’t fit the road like a foot

so nothing about you knows where it’s going.

And drifting like smoke

is not the same as lighting the wick

and blowing everything out

to see better in the dark.

The trouble is

there are no eyes in your blood

that shine like the tears of the stars

when they look down upon human indifference

like the obscene afterlife of their light

and turn themselves inside out

not to be what they see anymore.


PATRICK WHITE