YOUR OWN LIFE IS THE WAY

YOUR OWN LIFE IS THE WAY

 

Your own life is the way

whether it charm itself through the woods

like a small snail

or kick the stars up like dust

along the Road of Ghosts

or hang back like the sea

enduring its own weather

waiting for the next loveletter

to arrive like a sail

over the event horizons

of so much unopened junkmail.

But you’re a long way off

and deeper in darkness

than you realize

if you’re using a searchlight

to look for a star.

There’s no reason

to keep showing up

at the wrong address

like a bad definition

of who you are.

You go looking

for the meaning of things

as if meaning were precious and rare,

baby teeth under a pillow

or lost wedding rings

through the noses

of unmarried skulls.

You chase your own tides

back out to sea

and then go ask the waves

trembling in their tidal pools

like children you’ve frightened

about the meaning of water.

But when they tell you

your mouth hangs open

like a grail in the hand of a drunk

who’s sure she just drank poison.

You want to pry

the petals of the flowers open

before they’re ready to bloom

as if you were unwrapping your presents early

although nothing’s been hidden from you,

cloaked, eclipsed, or covered by a lie.

You paint the window you sit at

all the colours of a parrot

to enhance the clarity

of your longing for stars,

or scare yourself to death

with things you can see in the night

like someone who’s been left behind

like a key under your own doormat.

The return journey goes faster than the first

as you progress backwards

looping like a planet 

through all the stations of your youth

into the second innocence of awareness

knowing how deeply the soul

can be soiled by the truth

of things as they are

and how, sometimes

to the baffled astonishment of the purists

it takes a little dirt to wash it off;

which is to say, you’re human.

Not one reason for everything.

You keep ploughing the same broken record

like a season stuck in a groove

never leaving anything long enough to itself

to germinate and bloom.

Even when the moon

walks on your waters

tapping its white cane

at the curb of every wave

to show you how to master

your own blindness

with your own light in the darkness

of why you won’t open your eyes and look,

you cover your face with your hands like a book

you fell asleep reading.

But you can’t wake up from a dream

you’re not having.

You can’t look into life

like a window from the outside

or arrange your eyes

like lenses in a telescope

to view things at arms length.

I know how hard

you’ve been looking for enlightenment

and the agony of your disappointment

that you can’t pull the sword from the stone

or the apple from the seed like autumn.

You account the waste

of time, energy, aspiration,

and want to burn the whole orchard down

like a bride widowed in her wedding gown.

But the fire you set

like a last blossom on a dead branch

goes out like a torch in your own reflection

and you’re lost in the woods at night

without a road going in any direction.

You thought you’d hang around

with the constellations,

but there you are

whenever you kick the earth

like a stool away from your feet

dangling like a streetlamp in space

with only go slow and stop

the three expressions

that ever cross your face

like birds hoping they’re heading south.

And I don’t want to sound mean or unkind,

or suggest that I know

how stars taste to the blind,

or that you’re not a fury of insight,

a blazing chandelier, a broken mirror,

but when you cry

you launch your tears like submarines

into your own paranoid depths

to listen to what the others

are saying about you now

and you deploy your emotions like spies

to keep an eye on the opening night projections

you’re trying to groom into a movie

where everything comes true

all at once

in a stunning climax of you

holding out like a bridge at the fall of Rome.

Let go. Give up. Let the barbarians across

that you’ve abused

with the severity

of your savage passions for years.

Abandon the walls

you’ve beaded like a rosary of skulls

around your imperial frontiers.

How can the frowning jewels

of a dying civilization

dragging itself by the heels

like a corpse through the night

compare with the more imperfectible delights

of leaving the mindstream to its own devices

as if it were wise enough all alone

to make its own circuitous way home

like blood returning to the heart

while we, who don’t know the answers,

throw our swords back into the lake

as if we were surrendering to water.

We could feed the demons

of our startling immensities

all those doves you sent out looking for land

that came back like cornerstones of quicksand.

We could stop trying to square the circle

like college drop outs

trying to corner the rain

and forgo the blinding lucidity

of what we think we know

for the darker esprit

of being swept far out to sea

like two castles effaced by the undertow

of an abyss even the light can’t cross.

We could lower our bridges

and open our gates

and liberate our prisons

as if we were making love

like two more bad little reasons to live.

 

PATRICK WHITE