COCOONS

COCOONS

Weary of lies and the soap operas of fruit on the verge

of their due dates, weary of men and women and breezy friends

with smiles like illegal fishing nets across a river, bored

with the multiple personalities of stale bread growing pools

of blue-green bacteria like a bad imitation of the moon, the people

who landed safely from a long way up

but drowned in their parachutes, the earth-bound

curb-worn excuses that never learned how

to park a star without getting burnt; and nowhere to go

with all of this unspooling of an old documentary

that isn’t me anymore than the echo of a diamond is;

sick of approaching the vital signs of every oceanic dilemma

with the heart of a well, the mind of a winch

and the balls of a bucket, without malice

and I repeat it, without malice

because my mind is not a shoe full of interrogative scorpions

and my blood has never gone white long enough

to call itself an ice-age and there’s always a clown

to warm things up with sad defeats and comic thawings

and most things are just old bottles in a barn anyway,

tired of witching the watersheds of mystic sublimities

that are always flying away like herons startled in the moonlight,

or stars with the eyes of fish, lovers

washing the doves of their hands in the blood of a rose,

jaded by the black translucencies of hell

that smell like cordite and lightning

and leave ambivalent messages on a storm-coloured mirror

lustrous as the eyes of a horse from a paid familiar

amused by the fool he courts, I write this

to no one in particular knowing it’s a way out of the stone

I’m swimming through like ore, a dream key

to a cormorant fountain of elegant transformations

that haven’t been born yet, faces that return from childhoods

yet to come, roads to go down that aren’t roads

until I walk them, all here now in the lifespan

of a heartbeat, singing like sirens of oxygen

to seduce the wind away from paler tresses

and rattling windowpanes. Little matter

who the return journey is if it ever gets there, finds its way back,

there are fires along the way so intensely

beyond the last farms of colour

their serenity is their fury

and all this world of discernible form

in the light of that light,

a pilgrimage of shadows. And by that, do not think

there is a secret eclipse up the sleeves of flame

that rise from the candles of my adoration

because it was the world in the profundity of its playing

that lit them in the first place to celebrate

the way it hides from itself when anyone’s looking

and the way it looks when anyone hides. So I hide my wave

in the water and hang my fleece in the sky

on the branch of a dangerous star tree

to test the nerve of the neophyte sailors

who come from ports like me that are

no more than a drop in the bucket

of all there is to be. Now everyone is an effusion

of this nullity, the creative efflorescence of a cosmos

suggesting dandelions and dishevelled magnolias to the dark,

releasing black cherries and bells of deadly nightshade

to wander the forsaken labyrinths of the moon,

or shaking chandeliers of water out of the light,

worlds within worlds, fire harps in tears, and the brief urgencies

of the eyes that put them out flung out over the grass like silver seeds

in the way a dog shrugs off a lake, in the way

I’ve just emerged from the palace in the rock like a sullen metal

stapled to a wound in a tight-lipped corner

of a memorial shrine to unknown spiders,

and looking up at the stars rinsed out of the willow’s hair

released myself from this web of torn horizons

by handing out cocoons to everyone for free.

PATRICK WHITE