WATER HAS ITS FOLLOWERS

WATER HAS ITS FOLLOWERS

Water has its followers

but the wind is free of an audience.

It doesn’t encourage cults of wild irises and daylilies

along the flowing of its banks.

It sows the orchards with the pollen of stars

it kicks up like dust at its heels.

But my voice isn’t the larnyx

of windmills and waterwheels

and when I speak

I’m always one among the crowd

that’s listening at the same time

to a conversation with themselves

that took the words right out of my mouth.

My voice is a seance.

The dead use it like a bus stop.

The swallows and the pigeons

drink from it as if it were a public fountain

efflorescing like an Easter lily in Florence.

It’s a guitar. But I am not

the medium, the message, or the master.

Sometimes my voice comes in the mail

like a self-addressed suicide note

I wanted to take a cheap form

of copyright out on. Be dead

by the time it got here

like the light of a star that’s gone on ahead

so I won’t need to open it to the public.

No echo. I know it’s a black hole

with nothing to say to anyone

who isn’t as singularly empty as it is

cowboying aeons of dark matter into galaxies

that won’t stray from the herd like starfish.

Still life with clown, sometimes

it finds me meditating among the pears

or half-lotus in the nunneries of the waterlilies

praying for something important to come down

like Jesus or a ufo and take me away

just take me away for good from this alien place.

When it talks as if it’s been insulted

I’m the one who loses face when it decides

it would be more honourable for me to die

facing in the direction of my chi,

gutting myself on a compass needle

that’s been in the family ancestrally,

than waste my death as I have my life on poetry.

And when it’s in a less ceremonious mood

it holds a broken beer bottle up to my throat

and threatens to cut my heart out

like a bird stuck in a chimney

putting wings on its jugular like a one-stringed harp.

PATRICK WHITE