A HUMAN CLOSER TO GOD

A HUMAN CLOSER TO GOD

 

for my mother for so much more

than a son can say

 

A human closer to God than most of us

or a God closer to humans

or the expiration of the shadows of both

in a vast abyss where there’s nothing to shine on

so neither good nor evil could be exposed

and all that was left was this deep sad night

that saturated everything as if

compassion were the only daughter

of space and time

and whatever you believed or didn’t

you knew how to take something ugly

and make it beautiful.

You were an artist long after

you gave up painting

and put your life in a trunk.

You had four kids to work with.

And if I am not now the masterpiece

you aspired to achieve

yet I am still your work

your son

and the work is not yet done.

Autumn burns like colours on the wind

as I squeeze chameleons

like tubes of paint

out onto the table I use like a palatte

to capture that wry hook

at the end of your compound bow of a smile

that turned its arrows into flowers

whenever you looked at one of us

and forgot you were our mother.

I remember the night Bill

the drunk who endured next door

came over old and hurt and pleading from withdrawal

and you went without a word

and got your purse

and opened it like a pelican

and gave him five of your last ten dollars

a fortune back then

without diminishing the dignity of the man

by telling him not to spend it on a bottle.

I knew we’d be eating bread pudding all week

as I watched him step out into the night

a little less broken

and though your eyes met mine

like a dark angel in passing a moment

as if you were a stranger who couldn’t explain

what you kept hid in your heart

and nothing was spoken between us

that one brief insight

into things I know

but still don’t understand

has been my only religion ever since.

The hero-soldier of the little man

who wanted to be your son so badly

that he often forgot that he was

still lives on in me somehow in the way

I’ve stood up for other people over the years

because when I do

it’s always seems as if

I were standing up for you. 

And I embody your darkness and pain

like alien elements in the heart of a black star

that keeps imploding on itself

like a heavy bell

that can’t escape

the mother of its own gravity.

I am more of what you never taught me to be

than anything you ever said

and if you were to ask me now I would say

you put more space into me than you did time

and what I’ve learned from you

I’ve learned by studying the stars

and never forgetting to be astonished

by even the meanest of flowers.

You’re the unseen matrix of dark matter

that shapes this white mass of starmud

I call myself

like a potter

into everyone I’ve ever been.

And as many times as I’ve been hardened

in the clear flames of the Queen of Dragons

when you were outraged

by the likeness to my father

you scorned in me as a child

and probably still haven’t forgotten

I have burned more often in your fires

like a martyr in cool silk

and risen from my ashes with a bigger wingspan

and a sky with more room in it than the cosmic egg

I lived in

before you cooked me out of myself into space

because you were bitter about men

and I couldn’t help being one of them.

Thirty-eight years away from home

and I’ve been back twice

like a homesick prophecy

that didn’t heed its own advice

not to trouble an aging sybil with bad dreams.

Time and again I have been defeated

by what I owe you

and will never be able to repay

in any measure of the heart I could weigh

against what you gave up like the gift of gifts

to those of us you refused to throw away.

Somehow you always managed to be

the green bough in blossom

we all held onto like the strong rafter

of a shakey treehouse in a storm.

Sometimes I would watch you

through my bedroom window

look up from gardening in the back yard

and stare way off into the distance

as if you were a bird

disappearing into yourself

to make it all the way back

to Eden in Australia

from Vancouver Island on your own.

How could I know the other hemisphere

you always were away from me

like a lost paradise

or the strange stars you walked under

like stations of the southern cross

you bore all the way to Canada

like a mother to a hill of skulls?

When did Eve conceive the Virgin

you became over the years

to keep us from being abused?

And how did everything shiny and new

turn into something used?

Voodoo mother

I feel the ancient curse

of my father’s whiskey-breath

defiling the angels dancing on the heads

of all these pins you keep pushing through me

like dark insights into what it means to be a man

and worse.

If my infancy was nettled

like a diaper rash on the moon

now it has deepened into a wound

like the grave I know I will be buried in

like a dagger that refused to strike back

at its own womb

because I have suffered enough

in your name to know

there was never any malice in your eclipses

and if I ever had a childhood

it was just the way things had back then

of growing old before their time

like lots of girls and boys

with lots of broken toys.

Moon mother

I am the son of the dark side

you keep turned away from me like the face

of the woman I’ve never seen

and you are the public figure in the townsquare

of your bright side

that I have failed intimately

like a refugee in the shadow

of the Statue of Liberty

that forbids him to land.

And I think as I turn into an old man

I am beginning to understand why

it isn’t just the angels

that can’t go home again

but the prodigal demons as well

who are kept at arms length

not by any original sin

not by the bloodstain of their difficult birth

not because they were reversed

by the order of things

like the axis of Neptune

or a baby turned in the womb

and lived things from the outside in

not inside out as the others do

like Mother Hubbard’s children

piling out of a shoe

but because they were once loved

by someone like you

who laboured like the earth

to sustain the life of things

that were less than your due

and more underwhelming

than the undertow

of the great sea of pain

that scattered them ashore

like children from from the womb of a lifeboat

only to watch them be swept under again

by strife and fear and time

like dolphins beached on their brains

hoping for rain

as if there were treasures beyond

the obvious riches of life

that wholly long to be lost

like the black pearls

of many moons in full eclipse

in the perilous depths

of what they couldn’t attain

like wrecks of gold

that never made it back

to the black madonnas of Spain.

Gypsy mother

I take my blood

like a red scarf in my teeth

and though I am lame when I dance

because one heel is winged by the joy

of a wild boy at the top of an apple tree

throwing celestial fruit down to you below

to make earthly apple sauce

and the other is a rudder of grief

lost at sea like a lighthouse

that let the lights go out

like a torch in its own reflection

at a requiem for water

I celebrate my love of you now

while we’re still both alive

like a crutch celebrates the tree

it was carved from

like the mystery that still binds us

to the glacial haste

in the heart of the turtle of time

that moves on like history 

overcoming every obstacle

like the river of playful grace

that flows from a mother otter

down from the mountain teeth of the shewolf

that howls to her own kind

like a litter suckled by the moon

in a lair on the dark side

of a heart and mind

even I can’t follow you back to

though I long like spring to know you again

as you were then

and as you are now

and as you will always be to me

a fifth season more than life knows how to end.

My astonishing mother.

My unexpected friend. 

The breath within the breath of me

that lives behind these lights and veils

I keep lifting to look upon your face

into those green green eyes of yours

that once washed me up out of the sea

like the child of a shoreless wave

like the son of an island universe

that never abandoned what it couldn’t save.

 

PATRICK WHITE