I LIKE A LOT OF SOLITUDE

I LIKE A LOT OF SOLITUDE

 

I like a lot of solitude with my freedom.

I don’t like my liberty cramped.

I don’t want to be exiled from my past

or summoned to my future.

If there are longings

let them find their own fulfillment

like rivers flowing to the sea.

If there is darkness

let it come to light

and may the fireflies

and the emerging stars

jolt you into lucidity and life

as deeply as the lightning bolt

of an insight

that doesn’t leave scars.

The rarity of a few brief moments of clarity

has always made more

of an impression upon me

than a lifetime of dreams

and whenever I’ve come

to a trine in the road I’m on

pointing the way out to a wave on the ocean

I’ve always chosen the middle of three extremes

and chosen feet

over fins and wings

and walked on as if I knew where I was going.

To see things as they are

isn’t to rob them

of the strange beauty

of the way they seem.

It isn’t just enlightenment

that lays the moon

cooly on your forehead

in a fever of life.

Your illusions

are creators and healers too

engines and instigators

of what makes you you.

Trapped in the mirage of a burning house.

You’d need a mirage of water to put it out.

Real water wouldn’t work.

Sometimes it takes a lie

to expose a lie to the truth.

Anything that heals is true.

And anything that wounds is not.

Salvation can wait until we’re dead.

What the world needs now is rescue.

That’s why my heart drifts with the current

like a lifeboat

that’s been emptied of everything

including myself and my name

to make more room for people to get in. 

And if they’re out here with me alone

out of sight of land or hope or human

I teach them to swim through the great nightsea

like the stone of the moon

thrown through a window of water

to keep the lucidity of the child inside

from going out like the afterthought

of something mad and beautiful

that died in old age.

It took a fool to enlighten the fool

who became the sage.

It takes a lot of suffering

to look look deeply

into the heart of joy

and not feel saddened

by the way I disappointed the boy in me

by not finding an easier way to be happy.

 

PATRICK WHITE