Thursday, July 2, 2009

I SWALLOWED MY OWN

I SWALLOWED MY OWN

 

I swallowed my own personal mystery

like one snake swallows another

or a dragon swallows the moon

to make it rain on its own flame

as if it were cooling a sword

in wounded water. A sane man

wouldn’t risk his ignorance

but a madman gambles

with enlightenment

by betting his eyes

on an uncertain insight.

Pain was a kind of physics

I had to take off like shoes

at the doorway of my own singularity

if I wanted to transcend

the incidental origins

of all the momentous thresholds

that parted and drifted away from me

like the wake of an empty lifeboat.

I ate my own personal history

like the bitter bread

of dead stars in a black hole

and time burned

like the temperature of the world

and the feverish dreams

that broke like blisters

and the aloof, cool moons

that sometimes dropped

their eyelids like blossoms

as if one thought shy

of assenting to my lunacy,

afflicted me alike

with caustic decisions

that made me weep like sand.

I was trying to put down new roots

in a mystic desert

that bloomed in mirages at night

and longed with every grain

and breath of its being

to turn its salinity into light

and for once

astonish the stars.

I wanted to honour human suffering

as something noble

and I was willing to labour

at living in vain

to believe in my aspirations.

But I drew pain down upon me

like the sea its own rivers and rain

and my heart imploded

like the black dwarf

of the wormwood star of Chernobyl.

Space turned to glass,

I was swimming through glass,

and the trees glowed at night

in the violet light

of a moon without eyelids.

And there was no one to talk to;

not even the silence would listen.

Oblivion looked into oblivion

like one blank mirror into another

and went on replicating itself like a word

in the mouth of a voiceless forever.

Night after night passed

like a species of used-up life

looking for extinction in a tarpit.

I’d fix my seeing

like an astrolabe to a star

and go down with my ships

like a navy in quicksand

whatever course I set.

I sought shelter

in the shadows of myself

as if the darkness

could contain me like a loveletter

someone forgot to send

but I was indicted by a wound

that even the emptiness couldn’t mend

for a lack of content.

I deluded myself that if

my innocence cross-examined itself

truthfully, eloquently, long enough,

the jury was certain to hang itself

for all the things I haven’t done.

I entered a fingerprint from my childhood

into evidence as exhibit A,

but my identity

was considered as irrelevant

as yellow tape at a crime scene

where the victim lies wrapped like a gift

to the god of Halloween

whose candles burn down

like a temple on a birthday cake.

Until only one unimploring pillar

is left standing

with nothing to uphold

but the great black flame

of the indifferent sky

that sweeps people and stars

like dirt from the stairs

and among the grand

and tiny dreams of creation,

bluffs an uncanny dignity

from the silence that falls

like eyelids and night

over the homeless faces

of the mindless graces

that inspire our devastation.

 

PATRICK WHITE

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 


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