PATRONYM

PATRONYM

And relieved to be vast again, stepping through the backdoor

of the murdered house where I left my heart

inscribed on the studio floor

in a rosary of chalk, martyr to a rage of freedom,

I fathered a gentle nation in the eyes of bellicose stars

humbled by the failures of the wise.

Venus in Virgo and eras of birds in the trees, my blood

proclaimed propitious omens of a thriving solitude

to the knife of light that candled in my hand.

The ghosts of dead wolves padded through me like a pulse

and as far as the night could see into the blind water

of the flowing clock that aged like the moon

on a pilgrimage of tears, I was saved by the bleeding bell

of my own sorrow, a lifeboat in the desert,

the colossus of the sky bridge in my brain

that spanned two hemispheres with owls of inquisitive light.

And though I’ve agreed to disagree with fate

and account my eloquent wounds

the restless graves of dark angels buried in sacred mirrors,

there’s no point in desecrating the obvious,

I enflamed the insurrection of lost keys

that clamoured for sanctuary at the cemetery gate

with radical slogans of bones and ultimatums of flesh

demanding passion or death for the squalls of sparrows

that kept arriving like refugees, relics of the true cross.

And I have been liberated by so many things,

science, art, religion, history, politics and love,

struggled and died in the name of so many opening doors

that every thought is a transgression of thresholds,

every morning, one link less of the chain,

the victorious entrance of rebel birds into an abandoned capital.

I’ve lost count of the nights, furious with stars

that have overthrown the masters of precision,

and the soft blue skies charmed by the eyes of elegant women

that have run up my spine like makeshift flags

they’ve suppled from their urgent blood,

everyone a comet, an evangel of leaves, fire-bloom

on the dead branch of long, imperial winters.

How could I not be grateful

to the underground cabals of the rising spring

that has purged my house of fanatics and spies

who watched me out of the corner of their eyes

with the cunning of shattered windows? All praise

to the uprising of the wind and the revolutionary rain

and the sun that comes beaming like a general

dressed in his workday shadows without his medals on

in a coup of transcendent water that has moved my roots to light.

And in the night, when I drink and laugh with the stars,

among philosophers and mystic poets stashed away like wines

against a day of celebration, what a joy

to throw off the ruse of my heart

and turn my tongue loose like a slut,

no more informers at the table. Who cares

if I am famous for falling down

among the lighthouses and watchtowers of sober cities,

or if I’ve got my life on inside out?

What road doesn’t follow me home to my last address

like a star that wants to get lucky or a crutch

that doesn’t want to enter heaven limping?

How can I be lost among the last minute godsends

and landmark suicides that have put an end to the firing squads

and their chronic executions of ice and snow;

even my glasses have emerged from their chrysalis

like a dragonfly with wings, and I am inconsolably happy

among the water hyacinth and clefs of fiddleheads

tuning up like heretics to all that whispers of change

between the parentheses of the moon that enfolds me in her arms.

And that is a mighty charm in the marrow of the matter,

that is much and more than enough to believe

that today is a literate beast that will confide in me tomorrow

the cryptic source of the star-flavoured rivers of life

and that now is the seed of being where all these rivers end.

And there is no doubt of the wonder that enraptures the radiance

of simply being here at all to enhance the shining

with wheels of rain and the light upon light of a mind

that was born to see things in a very human way. I am

so brief and little among the magnificent planets,

the whole universe out to the most ancient galaxy

acquainted with the void, no more in my deepening ignorance

than the smeared mirage of the seductively unattainable

on the tinest shrine of insight and water

that hangs from a blade of stargrass in the morning like a world.

When the seeing is all there is everything lives

as if it were entirely the wealth of an empty hand.

And I have squandered myself lavishly

on teachers that were never home until I discovered

where I live and who reveals the wells they drink from.

My death is behind me like the history of everyone

who’s ever walked upon the earth

welded like a fossil by the lightning

to the heartwood of their own mortality; and my afterlife

is affluent with cradles that only the moon can fill

with the dark fires of the new in the glowing arms of the old.

And never let it be said that I have not been intimate

with the indiscretions of the divine, not heard

the whisper in the background at the other end of time.

Despite the bleach of platitudes and the phantom auroras

that leech the colour from the truth like ions and sunspots

the lighter elements at the core of my burning,

the beautiful hydrogens, the heliums of spring

fused into iron and calcium, earth, blood, and bone,

and the watersheds of the shining almost

a ghost sea of the moon fed by rivers of dry shadows,

the dust of the road is under the feet

of the dust that walks upon it

like an old teacher who has known all along

what the white, sweet clover knows

and red-winged blackbird won’t deny.

The sweetest songs of the spring are robbed from the dead

who live on in the silence of exhausted chains,

the used umbilical cords of windless weathervanes

keyed to the lightning like keepers and clocks

and miraculous swords drawn from the stone

of the darkest prisons that ever gave birth

to this last, most terrifying metal of the disenfranchised,

this final embryo of liberty hidden in the rocks,

this incredible last stance of a defiant planet

that even in the confines of the grave

tools the crowns of its afterlife

from an ore without locks.

PATRICK WHITE