ALWAYS AWARE OF HOW UNKNOWN IT ALL IS

ALWAYS AWARE OF HOW UNKNOWN IT ALL IS

Always aware of how unknown it all is

even when I’m familiar with the path.

You can love someone for years, share

the same air they breathe, stand in each other’s light

and get along as well as plants and mirrors.

You can paint their lifemask through your tears

or you can watch the crackling spread

like the roots of their hair and know the names

of all the stars that take shelter in their eyes.

Then one night, who knows what it is,

the downdraft from the chimney on a winter night

parts the hairdo of the fire a different way,

a snowflake gets blown off course, the auras

evaporate like the Northern Lights, Orion

rises in the west, and you realize, for the few

you have, how many veils will never be lifted,

how mysterious and inexhaustible a face is,

almost eerie, as if you’d just stepped on another planet,

and that was ok, but you didn’t know anything

and you were seized by a terror for a moment

as if the unknown were deeper than solitude.

There’s an impersonal vastness under

the most intimate encounters with the world

that embraces everything like space

as an apprehensive, new dimension of awareness.

You cohabit with the strange. The leaves

you kicked through yesterday like someone

happy among their thoughts, are no longer

what they seemed, nor the small winds

that knew you as vividly as they knew their own breath,

bear any resemblance to your feelings.

They stay the same, limited by your understanding,

defined by the boundary stones of your relationship

to them, but irrevocably changed in a way

that scares you a bit, though you love them

as you always have, how do you love

what’s unknown about them with your heart

and your art, and your discipline, when

you don’t even know if that part knows you exist?

As with everything when you’re walking with a mystery

and it’s got no personal history except

the one you give it. The allegorical smile.

The mythic correlatives for the light in someone’s eyes.

The copulative metaphors that say this is

like a Rinzai Zen master who isn’t fooling around,

or the more gentle similes that suggest

the world into being without the imperatives

with looser fitting likenesses that appreciate the nuances.

Be like this isn’t as much of a straitjacket as Be this.

It leaves more room for the living to approximate themselves

like a garden, and leave a little out for the birds.

It’s humbler in a way because it doesn’t try to say it all.

It doesn’t presume upon the true nature of the secret syllable

we’re all trying to say to each other in our own various ways

as if we wanted to communicate, not just our names,

not just the facts we gather like dead twigs of one another

to start a fire on a bed of ashes, like sumac in the spring,

but the whole wild apple tree, the bloom, the leaves, the birds,

the lightning roots of our neurons with their tenuous hold

on the handful of starmud we’re attached to like the earth,

but what’s so eloquently unsayable about us

it catches in our throats like a starling in a chimney

trying to scratch its way out of a black hole

like dawn in an aviary of summer stars

going down in the west like a windfall of secrets

between the light and the water and the endless discretion

of the inescapable silence of the night sky

according each of us, with trillions of brilliant reasons why.

PATRICK WHITE