NOT IMITATING ANYTHING WITHIN MYSELF

NOT IMITATING ANYTHING WITHIN MYSELF

Not imitating anything within myself. Not

cloning, replicating, or even confining

the same seeds to the same plants, endlessly

spiralling through space like a galaxy or a hawk,

drift, release, and disperse, condense and shine,

shudder with motherlodes of lightning in the ore,

let the light turn back on itself like a solar flare

or an ingrown hair, let the presence show me

the absolute purity of its absence if it must,

and that which is greatly unknown retain its sublimity.

I seek nothing. And find it everywhere. I make

no appeal to the silence to make something happen

for a change, as if it had a mind of its own

that didn’t come with an explanation or an alibi.

Neither indictment nor confession, I’m not listening

to the stars through the black walnut leaves with my ears.

Three blocks away the teen agers sound like

white water in a small rapid, and the heavy night air

can barely keep its eyelids open, and though

I’ve lived here before they were born,

I am always the occasion of a stranger

who takes note and moves on down some deserted avenue

or path through the woods where the moon

and the stars appear more luminously invigorated

as they were before the town began to smoke them out like bees

and they dimmed to mere chalk dust on a blackboard.

I give a military salute to the lamp posts of the Imperial Guard

and go into exile like Napoleon. Je me souviens.

I will make no more wars upon my solitude.

I will walk with Sister Lunacy, my strange companion,

and we shall return our shadows to the darkness

like the feathers of two birds of prey renewing our wingspan

just to wheel on the wind like figure-skaters no one is watching.

Not to aspire. Not to long. Not to fulfil, acquire, or achieve.

Simply to act boundlessly as the smoke from a fire.

As the breath from our mouths on the afterlife of a star

that was a great arsonist in its time,

as the ashes of the bridges it crossed will tell you

in words of white phosphorus that will burn through your eyes.

Sweet absorption into the darkness on the other side

of seeing, I leave my images and metaphors behind me

like a man who’s just wandered off the job

leaves his tools as they are, and follows some intuition

lingering like the fragrance of a night out of time in the air

that means nothing sustainable to anyone but him.

PATRICK WHITE