I’VE GONE SOMEWHERE

I’ve gone somewhere

wherever this is,

and I don’t know how

the roads I knotted to mark the way back

came undone

like a bagful of snakes,

like lightning in a cloud,

ribbons of fire

leaping like wolves

from ripples of wood,

all the targets

stumps of charcoal

in the ashes of the arrows.

I can breathe the whole universe in

with a single breath

and let it out again just as easily.

There are bells in my blood so heavy

they feel like iron oxen

grinding their teeth in the void.

And I am hurt inexplicably

and lonelier than dust in the rain,

and my heart is an apple of wounded magma

pared like the phases of the moon,

and I am trying

to evaporate graciously in my solitude

like a ghost exhaled by a lake

so that no one notices I am gone,

but I keep sinking like a continent

bored with advanced civilizations,

the big bang as flat as the cosmic sigh

when life is nothing more

than the afterbirth

of a hydrocephalic with a hangover

as it seems when I stand

like a winter branch at the deserted window

and peer through the cold clarity of glass

as if the world were no more

than the sediment of time,

the lees of the wine,

the mud of a puddle in turmoil,

the wind shredding

the tree on the moon

with a chainsaw of waves,

the thought brides of an interminable severance

that falls like snow

on the grounded wings of the pine.

I’m trying on coffins like shoes

that won’t blister like sunspots

on the heels of the sun;

I am coronated like an eclipse

in a robe of black air,

and my shadow is snuffing the lanterns

in the depots of the bees

I keep like a hive of stars

working these graveyard shifts

of emergency honey

well before their paling in the light.

I swim toward the lifeboat of the moon for rescue

and it throws me a line

that threads my heart like a hook

I have to push all the way through

like a word that needs to say me.

I’m gilled in the torn nets

of the trawling constellations

like a piece of driftwood

from an uprooted forest

that one day just walked out on itself

like a temple or a throne or a library.

Eventually the doorways just wander away

like the footprints

of freshly dug graves

into a night without eyelids.

PATRICK WHITE