AND I TELL MYSELF

AND I TELL MYSELF

And I tell myself

even when the windfall under the apple-tree

is not gathered up and tasted,

even when it’s left to waste

in its own sweetness,

without even so much as a thought

of its being a gift, a donation,

or lamenting its degeneration,

without purpose or compliance

it goes on bearing.

What is it being effortlessly true to

if not water and sun, leaf and soil,

the labour of worlds and atoms and stars,

not the work of a single hand,

nor the toil of a definition

but the creative collaboration of everything

in the expression of a form

that is the first and last word

of a language that puts its finger to its lips?

Everything you see is keeping the same secret

closer to its heart than life

even though its very existence

gives it away.

Apple. Star. Moon.You. Me.

Not signs aligned by the hidden grammar

in the voice of God

commanding a world of nouns to be,

but the transformative clarity of unending verbs.

The Alone expressing the Alone to the Alone

in its native incoherence.

Shadow-water on the moon.

The light falling like eyes of rain

to the roots of the brain

that flowers into awareness

and not a leaf on the stream

that was taught how to write.

Autumn burns like the libraries of Alexandria.

You can read books about it

by the light of the stars

in an hourglass

late at night

suspended in time

like a homey window,

or you can dare your own freedom

and live like a jewel of water in a desert.

You can gather stars around your fire

like eyes out of the darkness

deepened like sacred wells

by the secret felicities of night,

and gratify the sky’s appetite for stories

when your voice flares up like the wind

and it isn’t the air, it isn’t the tree,

it isn’t the leaves,

it’s your own mind singing

as it carves guitars

out of its ageless heartwood

that anyone can play

from the inside out

as easily as they play their own body.

PATRICK WHITE