Wednesday, February 1, 2012

ARE YOU BORN YET

Are you born yet, you who will understand this
when I have receded like a wave into the foam
of oncoming stars, no more than a cachet
of this remote flowering in the darkness,
one man’s indeterminate attempt
to carry the cherished fire
of his own indefensible humanity
like lightning in a battery
with umbilical cables and fangs
to jumpstart yours in a dark, cold time
that hasn’t happened yet? Are you there sometime
up ahead beyond this boundless falling
ignorantly pure and ferocious as I was
springing out of the nebular hypothesis of your own breath
like a tiger of light on the jugular of the judas-goat
life chains to a wounded cross of southern stars to catch you,
the crux australis of the issue? How many times
have I pictured you in the albums of futurity
tracking these words of mine back to me
in the lair of this particular day
trying to anaesthetize its own wounds
with the cleansing pyre of an antiseptic tongue?
This very moment that’s already gone
I imagine you glaring out of an overgrowth
of brindled shadows, arrogant and uncompromising,
the brutal judge of your own earthly excellence,
hunting alone, or trying to unmarrow
the message in the bones I’ve left
like gold in a bottle of ore, fireflies in a grave,
or a constellation in a folder of night skies
stamped for the black crescents of your eyes only,
these prophecies of chaos that only you can true
to the book of changes I leave you.
If you are young when you come to these skulls
like rain to the headstones around the ashes of old fires,
respect what must be you in time as well
as if it were your own reflection erased like a phoenix
from the gaping mirrors of witless carbon
that are all that remains of anyone’s renown,
the black dwarfs of a critical collapse of light.
But if you are old and marooned
on a glassblown island in a barefoot desert
when you stumble across these shoes in the dark
I’ve sent on ahead like the footprints
of who and where I might have been, don’t hesitate
to put them on like an urgent journey
to the circlet of the western fish
and dance your way back upstream
into the star shed of the oasis eyes
that spawned you from a dream,
your gray flesh restored, as it is today,
to the salmon rose of dawn, to the secret spring
of the key I buried like an equinox in Pisces
as an antidote to my own September crisis.

PATRICK WHITE

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