AS IF I HAD JUST LET GO OF SOMETHING HUGE

As if I had just let go of something huge,

the glacier of stars

that has been driving me

like an enlightened ox all these years

to grind bread from my darkness,

as if a planet fell out of a dragon’s mouth,

as if turning the mountain around

I were no longer the cornerstone

of a temple I were being slowly crushed under

in the name of an unknown purity

that clung to me like the last of a species.

I’ve been consulting oilslicks

and eclipses as if they were starmaps,

I’ve been downloading constellations

onto a heretical hard-drive

to upgrade my fate, trying,

though it’s like trying to spawn upstream

when it isn’t easier than rain

to detach from my subjective imaginings,

the billboards and the midways

and the golden chains I look so good in,

all the Venus fly-traps of my creative idealism,

the gambler’s pride I took

in witching for water in hell

with a seasoned branch of lightning.

I’ve been pouring myself out on the ground

like nightblood from a wounded dream for years,

like a rare wine that had the elan to squander itself,

to transcend its own visionary delirium

this side of the river

where the fires bloom and spread wildly downstream

like supple bells of paint,

tender intrusions of beauty,

and even love bleats like a judas-goat

roped to a stake smeared with fat,

and it’s no one’s fault

when two masks stop crying for each other,

trying to irrigate a desert on the moon

with a glass tear

or predict the orbit of a firefly with a mirror.

And it’s cold and alone

and profoundly insignificant

when you realize

that there is no ultimacy at the gate

that will greet you,

looking up from your weeding,

with a smile, no clarity

that can wash your eyes away like ice,

and no one to give a bouquet to

that isn’t already a flower.

Intelligence isn’t enough,

imagination falters.

The spirit constantly denuded of itself

like spring from the wind

eventually sees itself reflected

everywhere in matter like time

and comes to rest

like a waterbird on the moon,

the shadow of a door that always opens onto itself,

like a valley, or a god, or a pair of wings,

the next breath.

Those who don’t know

look for a meaning to existence;

those who do

gather the bruised fruit with compassion,

and tamp their eyelashes

around the impoverished root like tea leaves

steeped in the cool bliss of their tears.

The stars look down in wonder over them,

as if a rose could be a bloodstream,

and marvel that there should be such hearts in the world,

where the lighthouses

are stubbed out like cigarettes

in the eye of the approaching storm

and the pyramids turn to quicksand.

And the wonderful absurdity of it all is

it doesn’t matter who you are,

a river or a highway,

a spider in a poppy,

or the iron daffodil

of a parking meter in bud,

until you let go of yourself like a scarred bell

that isn’t a phase of the moon,

and open the eyelid of your stone coffin

and breathe yourself out like a dream

into the shadows of your afterlife,

until the pulse of your whole being

is a tide and a threshold

that sweeps over you

like a sky over an uninhabited island

you’re still a rumour in the darkness

trying to reverse the disgrace

of an infamous legend of light.

PATRICK WHITE