IN EVERY FACE I PASS, THE INSUFFERABLE SMOTHERING

IN EVERY FACE I PASS, THE INSUFFERABLE SMOTHERING

In every face I pass, the insufferable smothering

of human potential to achieve great things,

take the jewel out of the ore and let it shine

in the light of their eyes, their hearts, their minds.

As if a new star had been added to the night

and they had lived a life that enhanced

the radiance of their insight. Wouldn’t that

be happy? To see these dead apple trees

in an abandoned orchard suddenly break into bloom

and bear fruit? To see the bears and the birds

the wasps, the humans, gathering it up

like a windfall of small, habitable planets

among the New England asters of a fertile galaxy?

If only so much didn’t depend upon subjunctives.

If only chance were incorruptible, if only

things had gone your way instead of their own.

If only we hadn’t been born into everything

we’re missing, if only our longings had less to do

with what we actually want. If only our words

weren’t links in another chain of iron or gold.

If only we stopped chasing our mirages around

like water in a turmoil of starmud that smudges

the view, and stop dying of thirst like fossils of fish

in a freshwater lake that tastes of our fear of death.

Would the deserts bloom so the children

can be fed? Would the stars efoliate into

cures for cancer like the occult herbs of a jungle

that dipped its arrows in the honey of life?

Would old men waste their time on useless dreams

and the children not be taught to mistrust the rain

for the lies we ourselves told about the nature of gain

as we stepped on a ladder of everyone’s throats

thinking higher was safer than lower

when we’re caught like birds in a chimney?

Are the stars in our eyes antithetical to the black holes?

And our irises lifesaver rainbows? Isn’t

just to be here aware of what we’re seeing

so that every grain of dust on this long, strange road

shines as if the Milky Way were under our feet,

and everything were neither far nor close

but the whole of us in every single part?

I keep thinking you only need to touch the heart

of someone, like ants tell peonies when to bloom,

and everything will be revealed like moonrise.

How incredible it is there’s so little wonder

in our eyes, so little tenderness toward

the brevity of the lives that suffer along with us

into an abyss where we don’t even know

if we’ll ever exist again to see all this as it is.

Even to suffer, even to fail, even to dread the darkness.

Even to ask what place is this you’re passing through

and be undeterred about not accepting

your own dead silence as an hospitable answer

worthy of the mastery of being able

to pose the question as if someone else

were there with you who knew what you meant.

Express yourself. Shine. Bloom. Rain down

on everything alike to show the abstract eye

of the truth, what new beauties can come

of your starmud when it’s sown by you as freely

as a child gives you a leaf or a twig, or the head

of a poppy as if you hadn’t forgotten how to dream

along with her that your amazement is as good

a reason as any to be here. Write poems

to the opalescent sunrise of your toe-nails

or what the thorns of the rose mean

to a dead matador awash in the blood of a bull.

Irrational in the mirrors of reason, perhaps,

fill your emptiness up with the fullness

of your own absurdity and learn to laugh

at the unattainability of the things you aspire to.

Learn to play wavelengths on your spinal cord

as if the shape of the universe when it’s not a woman

is an eleven stringed guitar in the corner

where the spiders are walking its strings like bass runs

and every thing is singing along to the words

of a song that only they know like an aviary of voices

in asymmetrical harmony with the dawn.

Adorn your sorrows in the laurels of sacred wounds.

Now is the time to utter wow under your breath

and include the woman standing beside you

in your astonishment as well as the stars arrayed

to entrance your sense of the inconceivable

by giving you something to compare her to.

Lift up your head like a dormant dragon

that smells the moon on the wind and roar

like the solar flare of a flower that blooms in fire.

Sooner a brilliant failure than a mediocre success,

accept your incompleteness as a sign

of spiritual progress, your terminal homelessness

as the path of the wind among the flowers

of the starfields that depend for their lives

on your passing beyond the gates of their gardens

with letters back to the wilderness they came from.

Be the black sheep that burned the maps

in a flurry of chimney sparks and wandered off

like an irrevocable planet into the immensity of the stars.

And whether you sleepwalk on the thorns of life

or tread lightly across a river cobbled in skulls,

however the rose bleeds, don’t belittle

the mouth of its wound with with a grammar of scars.

PATRICK WHITE