IF THE DOOR'S LOCKED

IF THE DOOR’S LOCKED

If the door’s locked and no one home

I just wander off somewhere inside myself

wondering if it matters

I so frequently now

catch myself on the sly

beginning to enjoy my own irrelevancy.

The more I suspect I am nothing

the more I feel fulfilled

and in the far field

on the other side of the hill

that loosely holds the road

that leads away from your house

like the slack string of a kite that doesn’t fly,

it’s bliss to be no one again,

and peace not to have to try.

I lie down in the cool grass

like an empty boat on a farm

and there’s no other side to get to

that isn’t already under my feet

that can’t tell if they’re walking

on water, fire, or stars

or sprouting wings on their heels

like maple samara

taking the fall for autumn.

Unwitnessed reality

doesn’t train a teacher

to open anyone’s eyes

to what is and isn’t there

like the yesterday and tomorrow of a star

that puts out both torches

in the eye of an ocean of night

to salt the earth with a light

that can’t stop things from growing.

Irony misses the point

when it doesn’t understand

the transoxymoronic hilarity of creation.

The opposites just don’t engender one another,

they celebrate each other’s birth.

First silver of the moon

on the greening willow

pouring out its heart to the stream

and emptier than my eyes above me

as if space had o.d.’d on a hot shot of stars,

auroral mirages in the vastness of my dissipation.

Because the dark mother

in the abundance of her timelessness

has never stopped giving birth to everything

it’s as impossible to be born once

as it is twice.

Because there is

no inside or outside

to the inexhaustibility of emptiness

her darkness teems with the unborn

who have never known the thorn of perishing.

PATRICK WHITE