Monday, April 13, 2009

YOU CAN'T ORPHAN THE WIND

YOU CAN’T ORPHAN THE WIND

anymore than you can abandon space

or pry the universe out of the universe like an eye

from a skull or a ring

to save it from seeing itself

as it runs everywhere away in all directions

fleeing what’s centred in you.

You’re not the residue,

the lees of the Big Bang

trying to scry your fate

out of your own detritus,

chemical compliance

with a spiked alliance

in an area of local cooling.

Whether you think

you’re getting a little too much ahead of yourself

or falling far behind,

you’re still the Primordial Atom

before and after time

flashing out of the void

and returning to yourself

like a thief coming and going

through your own window.

And there isn’t a now

that yesterday and tomorrow

could ever track down like today

that isn’t eternal,

that isn’t an undefineable field

where there is no birth or death

or labour of stars on the nightshift

pouring you out like metal from a stone

that isn’t as intimate as oxygen

with every breath you take

to construe the world before you.

What have you seen or been or smelt or felt and thought

that wasn’t your own mind?

And if you were no one

before you were you

how can there be two,

let alone one?

What could outside and inside

mean or be

except the distance

between a wave and the sea?

How could any sword, word, world that arises

slay the water or wound the sky

when you’re the deep, dark watershed mother

of the original fountain

pouring yourself into your own mouth like the moon?

You parse your wholeness

into the things of the world

to define yourself

to the imperial rhetoric of a chatty brain

in a language of forms

who can’t know who you are

until you know with or without a doubt

what you are not.

You’re all of these things.

You’re none of these things.

Listen. The moon’s wearing earrings

that play like rain on the wind

and everywhere she catches the trees’ attention

like water longing to spill

into the empty seas she sails alone.

And her deserts are not the urns of the stars.

PATRICK WHITE

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