SOMETIMES THE HEART BURIES ITS SORROW

SOMETIMES THE HEART BURIES ITS SORROW

Sometimes the heart buries its sorrow

like a bell or an hourglass beside the road

as if it came upon a dead bird it couldn’t name

and returned it to the earth like unread mail.

There’s no gate where I’m going, the air

will tremble a bit and that’ll be it. Maybe

a firefly or two, to liven things up,

but no sign of lightning tearing its hair out.

I shall evaporate like a dream someone

couldn’t remember having, and what seems

so crucially significant now shall disappear,

disperse, dissipate like smoke from of a fire

and all that will remain of this passionate burning

will be an odd fragrance among the stars

that doesn’t arrest the attention of the bees.

And these things of my mother that she gave to me,

Blood, flesh, bone, breath and my love of poetry

and compassion for the world you need to write it,

deeply involved in an unrestricted love affair,

will be scattered like urns on the wind as if

my ashes had no respect for their individuality.

The waterclock ended in a desert of mirages,

not the afterlife of an embryo off to a good start.

The death of an art, the extinction of a species,

not the fall of a sparrow anyone notices,

and I’m not even saying they should if they don’t

anymore than they feel the loss of a skin cell.

Some people prefer umbrellas to wild flowers.

Icons of the moon without the dragon.

A mouthful of fire to the taste of water.

Tigers in a zoo, to the dangers of an open door.

It’s wrong to make love, music, poetry, colour,

compulsory, anymore than you can demand a friend.

Got to give time and space to the black swan

of a nugget of coal to realize it’s a motherlode

of diamonds born out of its progressive dissolution.

Translucent effusions of insight into

a speculative nothing, a flying carpet of wavelengths

unravelling on the loom of the moon,

just because the stars have left their genes

on a helical stairwell of flypaper like a chromosome,

doesn’t mean you’re a replicant of eternity,

or to see the onceness of life in everything

it’s becoming without consulting you

is some kind of exemption you can seek for yourself.

Enlightenment isn’t a ticket to pass, it’s

not to see the beauty of the chains in the bliss of delusion.

Not to make choirs out of your Maenadic desires.

When have you ever not done this, when

have you ever not realized you were the summum bonum

of your own conspicuous consumption?

But who asks you to die before you’re dead

to sabotage your artistic pursuit of happiness

whether you achieve it or not? The absurdity

of the search is enough in itself to make it profound.

Enlightenment ploughs you back into the ground

you came from like grass on the moon

and as a bigger fool that I could ever hope to be

once said: if the cold doesn’t go through your bones once

how can there be apricot blossoms in the spring?

PATRICK WHITE