ONE SIDE OF MY FACE ALWAYS TURNED TOWARD THE DARKNESS

ONE SIDE OF MY FACE ALWAYS TURNED TOWARD THE DARKNESS

One side of my face always turned toward the darkness.

Like the moon, like Mercury.

No more to see on the dark side,

than there is on the light.

One no more the sponsor of life

than the other is.

Not Janus-faced because

they don’t swing both ways

and even when you’re walking

hand in hand with somebody,

it’s still not a hinge.

There’s no threshold of the new year

between them

and you can’t cross it

wearing somebody else’s shoes.

There’s one light, one sun,

for the whole room

and it shines down on everybody alike

yet one side gives everything back

like water to water

eternity to time

and the other turns its face toward the wall

like a child that can’t be forced to participate.

Cold, iron thoughts my tongue sticks to

like an oyster straight out of the shell

on freezing metal.

Two chunks of black anthracite

in a white stocking.

Deimos and Phobos,

terror and fear,

Martian moons with a downgraded albedo,

black meteorites in white Antarctica,

because you’ve been a bad boy

and gouged out the snowman’s eyes.

And the lies I had to tell myself

to try and survive just being normal

without getting caught

picking it up on the fly as I went along

because no one taught me anything beyond the obvious.

And though there are well-meaning,

commonsensical taboos everywhere,

legions of cliches

against pecking at the walls of your comfort zone

with a stolen spoon for a pick-axe,

like a lifer that just won’t give up

trying to get out,

one day Jericho came crumbling down

like a scab

like a cosmic egg

some harried crow dropped on the ground

to escape the furious sparrows

when the sun stood still at noon

and I made a break for it

and I’ve been getting away with myself ever since.

Sometimes the darkness is solid and opaque

when space turns to glass

and I’m locked into my own eclipse

like a baby mammoth in a black glacier

like a message in braille in a bottle

that focused on the medium too much

and burned through what I had to say

like a lens without right-brained peripheral vision.

When space freezes on me like this

I’m usually situated among the asteroids

between Jupiter and Mars

trying to get myself together

by blending in with the other fragments

of the habitable planet we all hope

we can be again one day

though I’m not sure I really mean it

and my instincts smell a judas-goat,

I say it anyway.

And you mustn’t think

the gilded matador of noon

with his flashing white swords

and flaring cape of blood

is any less tangible

than the lunar bull of the moon on its knees

because that would be inaccurate

and upset all the mirrors in the room.

Hey, but out of that trough of a wound

the dog and the scorpion eat from

flows a dark abundance

like a Sahara of grain

into the hollow siloes of Joseph’s dream

like one of the spiral arms of a starfish galaxy

that martyred the black hole

that cut it off and buried it

like the right hand of something that offended it

to ensure the fertility of the crops.

Bright vacancy.

An apostolic imagist poet

looking at himself in the mirror

as if he were measuring the width of Flaubert’s windowsill

to see how many relics he could splinter

out of the true frame of the looking glass

to sell the ignorant masses back

their own family albums on photo-shop.

He looks at them.

But not through them.

He likes the blossoms like a hummingbird

delights in the trivia of day

but he never digs a well deep enough

to discover the dark root of the Dutch elm

that hydraulically draws all this up

from an eyeless watershed

like nine tons of water a day

and six million leaves.

If you’re a man of good conscience

your soul might have both hands

firmly fixed at eleven and one o’clock

on the steering wheel you wear like a halo

but it’s the dark engine with a will of its own

that empowers your going from beneath

and the wheels on the road

underneath your feet

not the one above your head

that bears you in the golden chariot of the sun

like a triumph through the slums of Rome.

Remember thou art mortal.

When you’re a bubble

that forgets where it comes from

don’t expect the tolerance of thorns.

PATRICK WHITE