OUT OF NOTHING

OUT OF NOTHING

Out of nothing, out of space, the abyss,

out of thin air, the fluids

my mother and father were

at the sacred junction of two rivers,

out of the vital organs of distant stars

empowering the darkness

like kingmakers,

out of enlightened delusions

and deluded illuminations,

out of the sea-wrought passions of an island

and a tragic propensity

for the more romantic

desecrations of originality,

and a natural Virgoan capacity

for truing the lies that others told,

shouldering the swamp

in a robe of the sunset,

I am ecstatically baffled by everything.

To be alive among birds and stars and trees,

to watch the moon smearing its way

across the bedroom window

as if it were a snail

undoing itself like a ribbon of silver

and know and feel and witness

in your blood

how strange and extraordinary

the naked awareness of the moment is,

life silently enraptured

by the vital mesmerism

of its own reflection;

and that reflection the whole of you

almost always drunkenly staggered

by the incredible specificity

of your own empty vastness

making you and the world up

as it goes along

like an intimate stranger on a country road at night

improvising a song, a chrysalis,

out of the random detritus of his life,

to announce his presence like a shy warning

and keep the dark at bay

by pretending he’s alone and happy.

Billions before me, billions after,

and not just humans, not just

what we can recognize of ourselves,

the biophobic homogeneity

of our cellular singularity,

but microbes and waterlilies and wolves,

all the arrays of life

that have rooted in water and sky,

or bound themselves to the Promethean agony of a rock,

generation after generation,

autumn after autumn,

bell after bell of the tide coming in

and going out,

as if someone were breathing,

as if there were a dark intelligence

more subtle and refined than light or water

saturating everything like the night,

summoning eyes out of its own torrential abundance

to greet the stars in wonder;

as if there were a single pulse to everything

that birth after birth

has authorized worlds within worlds,

to risk the dangerous beauty

of their own brevity

and overcome it

by realizing the astonishing perpetuity of change

is the unknown road

that leads them back home

to their own feet

like the only two cornerstones of here and now

that were fit to make the journey. Billions born

and billions dead

and still I am as dumfounded as the sky

after all these eras of living and dying

to say what the dawn is,

what the dusk might be

and who am I to enquire

if the night can know its own stars.

Sixty four in another year,

I can feel myself expiring,

all my diamonds sublimating into vapour,

and fewer and fewer birds

returning every spring to the pond.

It would be an insult to the face

of the ambassador of the obvious

to try to deny it

and like the moon

my face has been insulted enough

to plead for accuracy as a last resort

and go on waning through my phases.

Say it. With a little wishful thinking,

two or three decades left

and those arraigned

by the law of diminishing returns,

and I’m either ashes or in a hole.

But to me death has always seemed

an absolute constant

faster than the speed of light

because it devours time as well,

it eats the clocks

and the eyes of those who consult them

and the hands of those

who wind them up again

like babies and genomes and galaxies.

And who could deny,

observing the armies, the famine, the hatred, the disease,

the incessant tearing of flesh,

that the true business of government,

the deepest concession of civilization,

those we marvel at under our feet

and those in bombers overhead,

is an inept attempt

to manage death,

that death doesn’t litigate for the living?

In a hundred years

almost everything alive today,

this living weave of myriad forms,

these threads of blood

shuttled by a heart

on the loom of the moon,

will unravel like the smoke of a snuffed flame,

disappear like the compass of waves

in the enlarging wake of a waterbird

into an uncircumscribable openness.

The facts of existence today

are the rumours of the augurs of tomorrow,

and everything we lived as indisputably us,

the very ground and watershed of our being,

the love and the grief,

the wonderment and the terror

and all that we wrote in fire and tears and acid

like homeless delinquents under a bridge,

will swallow us incrementally

like a gaping serpent of quicksand,

unlock its jaws

and receive us like the obsolete keys to oblivion.

Turn away if you must. Change the wallpaper.

Tear down the windows and the view

like the closing night playbills

of a long-running comedy

with an unhappy ending,

or fuss over your afterlife like a pyramid,

or shout out in the darkness

across the boundless sea of this abyss,

believing there’s a lifeboat

drifting out there somewhere,

a new body

you can be hauled into,

a universe that’s still got room for you,

but carry the bride of your life in your arms

however you will across the threshold

on your wedding day,

tomorrow the only emergency exit

will be the flame

that leaps up to catch the bouquet.

PATRICK WHITE