TRYING TO SETTLE DOWN INTO THE SIMPLICITY OF MY WILDNESS
Trying to settle down into the simplicity of my wildness
inside a clearing in a grove of Long Bay birch,
one pine reflected perfectly on the sunset calm
of the intervening water. Just sit here,
not meditating, not painting, not trying to pose
the environment to suit the mood of the poet
or indulging in the anti-pathetic fallacy
that I’m somehow exempt from all of this.
I see. But I’m not looking.
I hear. But I’m not listening.
The beavers give me the benefit of the doubt
and decide I’m not there after all
and go on working around me
like another troublesome, harmless obstacle.
Nothing lonelier than the call of a crow in autumn
as it hones its beak like a sword that’s gone rusty
on the branch it’s perched on
and tries again and again
to figure out what’s wrong
by waiting for an answer that never comes.
It’s a black blob on the ink-blotter of the moon
rising almost full to the west
of a Pearl Harbour spiked with the masts
of a sunken fleet of trees in port,
a quarter-note, a misplaced comma,
an apostrophe that doesn’t belong to anyone.
I surround it with the similitudes
it engenders in me associatively
and enter crow mind
like a diamond travelling back in time
to when it was anthracite.
And don’t think of the diamond
as solid adamantine translucency
because it flows, it ripens, it falls, it weeps
like a supple absolute in play with everything
the way water is
when you pour it out of the grail,
out of the elaborate lattice-work
of a thematic atomic principle
that binds the whole to every particulate
like flypaper coiled the opposite way,
an hourglass turned upside down
like an empty hemisphere at last call
just as the Sahara returns
to nimble Capsians, antelope and grasslands
due to a change in the climate of time.
I enter the immensity of the crow
like a wingspan wavelengths wider than mine
and I’m horrified by the depths of its solitude
and how, like coal, like diamond, like me
before the diamonds thawed
its most dangerous wish was
to be consumed in the fire of what it longed for,
to break into flames and disappear.
And for the very first time
my third eye cried a tear
like an insight into the sadness
that makes light of the world
like a sacred clown that’s scared to death.
And then its partner came like a delinquent eclipse
that distracted both of us
from the intensity of the clarity
that was setting fire to the clouds all around us
in the damp, autumn sunset,
and they flew off like ashes in an updraft
and I was left sitting here alone
with one of my eyes put out
like a cold fire pit
the stars return to every night
like the highlights of the stories
I made up about them
to bridge the distance between us,
hoping I’ll add a new twist to the plot
like another branch on the fire
they first took their shining from
when we were all full of stories
that were lyrical, lonely and young.
Radiant with despair to know
what we were all doing here
trying to read each other’s minds
as if everyone of us kept a secret
so deeply within ourselves
we didn’t know about it
and weren’t in on it
because that’s how open and apparent it was.
PATRICK WHITE
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