ALL THE DUFF AND DETRITUS OF MEANING IN MY HEAD

ALL THE DUFF AND DETRITUS OF MEANING IN MY HEAD

All the duff and detritus of meaning in my head.

Turmoil of celestial sediments in a tormented creekbed

of starmud. Images and symbols, glimpses and insights,

effluvia of indelible impressions that focus

a whole lifetime into a locket of tears, mingling

in the waters of life like the tributary of a deeper feeling

entering my mindstream like a first violin

in a symphony of picture-music conducted

by the silence of owls with blood on their talons

singing Allah hu, Allah hu, Allah hu under their breath

like a Sufi dancing like the axis of a galactic umbrella

at the crossroads of enlightenment and extinction. I don’t mean

to be thematic about all this. It’s more a synthesis

of happenstantial contradictions and random nuances

in a matrix of suggestive wavelengths having sex

in a lunar snakepit like a triple x porn flick

wasted on a blind prophet who had already seen too much.

The sting of the most beautiful sorrows

ages like wine in the catacombs of your heartwood

if you let it sleep a long time like a passage of poetry

you never understood, but could taste its hidden harmony

as if you were drinking life straight out of your skull.

A rapture in the absence that lingers like a ghost of smoke

on a bridge that burnt a long time ago,

where it hopes to meet you again, though it knows

it can’t, the timing of our departures less crucial

than the content of our arrivals. The stars

pale in the dawn. Venus in Virgo. And the Pleiades.

Funny how we try to hang on to what we’ve already let go of.

So many lovers, friends, intriguing enemies, gone.

Dream figures that didn’t wake up with us

in the same surrealistic play of dark energies we did.

Farewell is always the shadow of a sad hope

standing in the doorway staring out

into the terrible emptiness of threshed fields in autumn,

weeping like a watercolour in the rain

back into the river we drew it from. And the wisdom

that comes like an afterlife, meagre consolation

for the excruciating transformations we endure

to adapt a little happiness to it like an exile on foreign soil.

I spread bread crumbs on the snow for the birds.

I hang meat on the clothesline for the wolves

when winter turns against everything that lives.

I wrap burlap on the roots of the rose the way

I used to bundle the scarf of my daughter

on her way to school when her breath

was a wraith on the air of a dispossessed exorcism

yet to come, and I would be the one she disposed of

as if the parents, not the children, were hostages to fortune.

So be it. Walk on. Bite the bullet. Swallow the loss.

Look at it through the eyes of an experienced star

speculating on what all the light comes to in the end.

What it all amounts to when the shining itself

must bud and bloom and fall. I love like a mammal

but I grieve like a reptile. I don’t show any feeling at all.

My blood returns to absolute zero. Entropy

as a kind of self-defence. I whip the air with my tongue

like lightning for some real or imagined offence.

By day, I scrounge for the sun on the rock of my skull.

By night, I wait for comets and meteors down by the river

like the eclipse of an advent calendar marked for extinction.

I can blaze like a dragon sage. But I live in a coma

like a neuron star upstaged by a comedic deathmask

and my mind is leaking out like anti-freeze through my hair.

PATRICK WHITE