OUT HERE ALONE

OUT HERE ALONE

Out here alone so late at night

with all these spectacular stars

burning through the clean glass

of the freezing winter air

I can almost hear them thinking

behind the myths of the cover stories

they’ve told for years

dark truths about life and light

it would be madness in a man to understand.

Don’t try to stuff the impersonal secret

of the universe

into your sentimental heart.

How could you ever fit its likeness

into a locket

and finger it lovingly as your own?

Out here alone so late

even if you have come

like a thief in the night

to steal from the light

when nobody’s home

there are no cracks no facets no gaps

no backdoors, unlocked windows

or emergency exits,

no stairwells or entrances

in these jewels of insight

that can feel your eyes falling upon them

like rain running down a mirror

that shuts you out

like someone in the bathroom crying

for reasons that are light-years beyond you.

However deep and sincere your tears are

they’re still only dry wells

in that vast ocean of awareness,

black snowflakes

on the roaring furnace of the abyss

and if you reach out with affection

hoping to make things better

by embracing it all

you’re still only tendering a kiss

to the gaping jaws of your own lipless skull.

There’s a silence older than space

in the bottomless heart of things

that makes intelligence seem

the unlikeliest of exaggerations

a human could ever mean

holding his mind up like a lamp to the stars

as if he could find his own way back by his own light

without the dream that themes his mindstream with creation.

But as foolish and futile as it is to surmise

or try to get a leg up on the wise

I don’t think the darkness

is the negative space

around the troubled face that appeared

after all the dots were connected

like rising constellations

in a child’s colouring book.

And I don’t think there are gods

squatting like frogs

on the lotus of the world

making us up as they go along

like wheels and roads

to the grunts and groans

of an axial mating song

anyone could mistake for a joke.

And I don’t think the stars

believe the things we say about them

or even remotely feel the mystic dread

of what it is to be a human

looking up at their shining

out of deeper darknesses within

where no direction can be given to the lost like eyes

that would never find their own way home again

were it not for the stars and fireflies that mislead us

from one illumination to the next

by giving the finger to the braille of the text

that would school a gust of stardust into us

like God gave life to Adam

and Eve gave life to God

long before there were any laws to blind them

like Satanic lightning bolts

uprooting their eyes like rain from the clouds

to put those fires out.

I look up at the stars

with the eyes of an exile

through the diaspora of my breath

and I want to think them all to death

like the people and things I’ve left behind me

when it was time to go my own way

anywhere into the darkness inside me

to see if I could shine a light upon myself

that didn’t blind me to the fact

neither in the beginning

nor in the end

was I there to witness the act

that made a certainty as good as a doubt

to the great indifference

that wasn’t trying to find me

like a needle of light in the heart of a haystack.

I look up at the stars

like a scarecrow in winter

trying to put its pants on

one leg after another

like a man

with nothing but time to burn

scattering his ashes among the stars

urn after urn

skull after skull

of the heretics and mystics

that were martyred by his scar-crossed heart

in the name of nothing real.

I don’t know what they feel

but I look up at the stars

like a black rose

of blood and starmud

in the last death throes

of self-immolation

and see in my own image

what I’ve always had

in common with creation.

PATRICK WHITE