IT’S NOT MAD

It’s not mad to ask directions from the lightning

and these clouds and roads of unknowing

that unravel like threads of blood

in the refutable hands of time, not mad

to follow the wind anywhere like the blind

or someone in love. Follow the feathers, the leaves,

the weathervanes of the flowers, the lifelines

on the palms of your hands that go nowhere

you haven’t already been, it’s all the same eventually:

there’s nowhere to go, just the going.

And there are crossroads of the mind

and intersections of the busy heart

with clocks in uniforms timing the traffic

that still can’t tell you where things begin and start,

or if you’re progressing backwards into behind.

And there are voices you can trust to lead you like streams

out of your lostness, and books, and maps, and dreams

and stars over the endless horizons of eyelids and hills

that end in themselves like shoes and roots.

Sometimes I wish I were a stone or a gatepost

or footprints on the moon of someone else,

or a stamp on a loveletter that went along for the ride

or a fish in the nets of the rain

dragging their gowns across the fields,

a firefly snagged in the curtains of a stranger’s face

or a key aloof as a locker in a midnight bus-station.

I wish I had a heart that knew what all its flowing

was about, or a birthmark bound for greater things,

and there are rosaries of geese heading south

and wandering planets that never seem to stray

and highways and rivers that make it through the day

without confusion, and people with a compass for a mouth

that I’ll just never be, never quite manage to be.

I asked a solitude at zenith once in transit

if I could share her circles like a shadow

and walk beside her with a thought for tomorrow,

but she raised a finger to the lips of her silence

and it ended that way in a commotion of waves

that carried me all the way back to shore on their shoulders

and left me on the beach of an island of infinite sorrows

where I began, a message in a bottle, a star in a canning jar.

I’ve always said my address is here and now

but lately I think I’ve been going around the bend,

madness on point, and only this starless darkness for a guide.

And maybe someone could find me if I were to hide

and maybe there’s a needle snaking through the grass

to show me there’s a way of knowing first from last

and which goblet of the desert to drink from in an hourglass.

PATRICK WHITE