Tuesday, February 14, 2012

BLUE FIRE


BLUE FIRE

Blue fire in your eyes, for years
I’ve watched you smiling everywhere
against the odds
of the secret you carry within you,
the pain you carry within you
like a broken mirror
waiting for the moon to rise
as if you were a thousand lakes, each
waiting for the pearl
that would answer their darkness from within.
I was always afraid of your edges,
the way you pretended
to mistake my face for a mask,
as if I was always up to something,
as if you could hear the whisper
of the assassin behind the door
before anyone else could,
as if your pain had taught you
to be quick and clever,
to double-back like a choir of tigers,
the ghost of a supple cougar,
and ambush the hurt
you were certain would follow
any overture of flowers,
the waterlilies rigged to go off
like dismembering mines,
and the globes of the cherries
that hung like streetlights and chandeliers,
like tears long held back,
covert bruises, and kisses long denied,
small, black, radioactive planets
charred by the wary shadows of Eve.
And I never thought
you could see more in me
than a passing newspaper
hurled at your door
like another bone of the world,
another slug-line, another playbill
sporting the plague-mark
of another macabre extinction.
And you almost convinced me I was,
you were so curt in your convictions,
so ready to diffract the light of the stars,
to bend their shining
into their emission and absorption spectra,
to show under the lens of your polished glass sky
the subtle skeletons of death
that proved their wings were ladders.
It would be obvious
to compare you to a field of burning wheat,
to point to the fish
that rudder like eclipses through your blood
from a safe bridge above your flowing;
and you were right
when you said it would take a long time
before I could write a poem about you:
it’s taken eleven years
of being suddenly startled by your beauty
as you showed up randomly
in the wrack and ruin of here and there
like a wild sunflower
that strangely survived its own innocence
in the ashes of a sacred grove.
I have never not been
shocked to see you
like a window coming around the corner,
like a loaf of gold in a hungry nation,
a star cluster out of the reach
of my autumnal fingertips,
a sky too far for touching,
and the light of the life
that animated your beauty
something clear and vital and lyrical
that exceeded even you,
something that shone out of you
as if the lantern couldn’t see
the shadows that danced in its fire,
what measure of darkness
was stunned by its poppy.
I know beauty well enough
to fear the black fire of its unattainability,
the terrible preludes of possession
that arrive like temporary reprieves
and suicidal postcards,
the brutal bedside confessions
that wire the heart to an electric throne
that dims the lightbulbs with a shudder of night.
And I have preferred my palace of ashes
to the diamond hovels
of impoverished beginnings,
remembering how my scars
turned into an untranslatable alphabet,
every letter the cartouche or coffin
of forgotten royalty
embalmed in the dirty rags of time,
the tars and feathers of farcical birds
trying to hatch pyramids
that crystallized like salt in a desert
after the lifting of veils and rivers and tears.
I have stood like a ghost at the gate
of a house I was born in
and admired the beauty of roses
that went on blooming long after
I had planted them and disappeared
to let them flourish in the rain and the sun.
And I have felt the thorn of moonlight
press into my flesh like a slow fang
charged with a fatal elixir,
cold infernoes of ferocious transformations
and endured my own afterlife
like a road and a wounded wheel
threshold after threshold of black ice
as my heart tried to crawl back to the tide
like an iron crab.
I have cultivated exotic solitudes
that couldn’t say my name
without laughing,
and heard the wind lament
my most cherished intensities.
I am no stranger to death
or the eerie emptiness
of laying myself down on the table
like the only joker in a full house
to ever make a guest appearance.
But I am too stubborn for regrets
or I haven’t been convinced
of their necessity yet,
and why should I belittle
so much joy and excruciation
as the mistakes a river made in its running
as if it could correct its way back to the sea?
Think of it.
All these stars
and not one in the wrong place.
But I grew sick of the useless pain
and the misery and the grief,
the cosmic effort to open a simple seed,
boundary stones hurled at the heart
and the hard bread of broken smiles
and the ghost food of the ego-feasts
that mistake mystic vision for a lighthouse
and run themselves up on the rocks
to be cherished among the wreckage
like emotional salvage;
and I had nothing more to give,
I had nothing more to say or celebrate,
my shadow confessed to an eclipse
it was a loser,
my blood bleached itself white
and packed itself like a fire hose
under a switch and a small glass window that read
in case of emergency, surrender,
and I learned to apologize
for all the wars I’d won,
and finance monuments to my defeat,
depict myself as less than what
I never had a chance to know I was
just to keep the rose
from putting its eyes out
on its own thorns.
And I did a good job of it;
I learned to love unconditionally,
I learned to love without love,
I learned to love without me.
I forgave and understood everything;
I shuddered in pain and understood,
saw how we all die eventually,
how the candles of beauty and truth
in this terminal vastness
are so rare and precious,
even unjustly they should be cherished,
not allowed to go out in the heart
even if death and betrayal took all,
even if every breath of a desolate lover
turned into a knife on the wind, an arrow of spite,
not to let the rage to be done forever with caring,
with hurting, with radioactive solitudes
that tainted the heartwells with vicious reason,
forsake the slightest victory of tenderness,
forgo the least memory
of human intimacy in such an implacable night.
But the darkness forgives no one
and the light is a vicious testament
to how many wounded there are in the world,
how many injured and broken,
torn down like doorways
at the end of a hall no one walks down anymore,
destroyed from within by a dream
that could barely say its name
to anyone who asked why it wept.
So many injured, hurt, condemned
by the silence of forgotten smiles
that have dispersed their seed
in the dusk of a vernal ephemerality
that no more acknowledged their passage
than a broom the destiny of dust.
And there’s a part of me that cares yet,
however many lashes of the mind
assault the heart like an island
with the salt of reason
and a tide of serpents, even now
my eyes crack in the heat
of so much suffering,
so much transformative fire,
the butterfly in the furnace of the dragon’s mouth.
But I had to grow tougher than space to survive,
to teach fire how to walk
on the dead seas of a vast moonscape
pocked with the astronomical impacts
of a childhood I lost like a leaky atmosphere,
I had to convince the world
I was at least as real and irrelevant as it,
that I could breathe in the randomness
the cold drafts of a faceless abyss.
I was a fraud out to prove his own sincerity,
and there are saints that would wince,
ferocious hermits in glass deserts,
hallucinatory purities of nothingness
that would tremble to undergo
the talons of the furies that afflicted me
like barbed stars on a chain
that refused to indulge itself with any key,
any liberation that smacked of peace.
And this is not a confession,
not an accusation or retrospective opprobrium;
nor does the withered branch
cling to the wraith of a blossom
any longer than it takes the frost of an early winter
to melt like an orchard.
I applaud the intensity of my mistakes,
the depths of my madness,
the unsustainable enlightenment of my rage;
how every victory was shadowed
by my own insistent mortality,
the doggish constancy of my own fallibility.
And there were perversities within me,
the dark haloes of my occlusive sanctity
that wanted to lead the night like a willing virgin
through the intimate stations
of the far fields beyond the blazing billboards
that urged a delusional frenzy
to seed her like a blind fish
in the gutted depths of an eyeless normalcy.
I wanted to dare my own horror into submission,
risk without counting
the sugar-coating on the placebo
of my inherited humanity
in the impersonality of the void
that never paid any heed
to the furious courage of my expansive folly.
What nonsense it all seems like now;
the renewable virginity of a junkie
that bled like a candle to shoot the moon
under the tongue of a pointless habit.
Who did I think I was, fool
that I was to believe
all these brutal masks of frost
were only waiting for the sun,
that the collective ashes of the ancient urn-burial
that calls itself society
would rise to the blue phoenix
that woke up drunk in the recovery room
eating its own heart
just to prove it didn’t need one
to remain true to its own transgressions?
In a fever of creation
I enhanced the quality
of human idiocy. An oracle, I revealed
the shallow roots of the sacred fires
and lit my cigarette and warmed my hands
over the eternal flames
that snapped shut
like the eyelids of windproof zippoes.
Like wardens the sun and moon
walked the ramparts above, high-powered rifles,
the heretical compasses of misdirection,
and I saw how even the stars,
the cool rush of the established constellations
were nothing more than the subtle tracks
of a long-term addiction
that could afford its own vice,
random derangement in the name of nothing;
the whole of creation
nothing but a black rock
cooked in a spoon,
the severed filament
of a wingless embryo of night
enthroned in the tomb of a shattered lightbulb.
Ecstasy became the ghoul of a horrid withdrawal
steeled to my isolation
and I reveled in the severities of my spirit,
the hospital furnace of a raging heart
that disposed of my gangrenous body parts,
the febrile infection of the disgusting dream
that cooed like a madame
in the brothel of a ruined magnolia
where I finally lay down with my spirit,
enshrined in the blood and mud and lust
of an incubator in hell
where I was delivered prematurely to the night,
the immaculate conception
of an inspired whore
that didn’t try to reform
the fire in the mirror that burned like a face.
Now no one can recognize me,
and no one can account
for the injudicious happiness
of a condemned soul
that can scatter its ashes
like stars across the sky
for the wind to dance,
a road of ghosts to nowhere.
And the days and the nights
rain and shine, rise and fall,
and blood, and time,
and the curse and the blessing of their carrying forth
into a carrying forth
like the eye of a waterclock,
occur as they occur
without blame or salvation
in a freedom that doesn’t know I’m here
to witness the improbability of their existence,
the improbability of you and I
sitting down on the concrete stair
of the bookstore where you work,
like two thorns removed from our own hearts,
free of the shadowless viper and the black rose
that taught us to bite and swallow
and I swear,
the spontaneous irony of your laughter
was sweeter than water lapping
the startled shores
of two islands on the moon,
both of us joyously distinguished
in a confusion of doves and crows
by what we had denied.

PATRICK WHITE

I MISS YOU


I MISS YOU

I miss you like a burn victim misses his face, misses the sky he used to wear like skin. I think I’m dying tonight; Friday night, wandering from unfinished room to unfinished room, trying on coffins, looking at death in the shedding mirrors, wondering what my life has amounted to, a raindrop in the desert, trying to green the hourglass time raises to its lips, twin goblets, drunk on sand. I want to bleed like a bell for the unfathomable reservoirs of human pain that have yet to be endured as the original tears of life, the rocks weeping, and even the mountain eventually burying its proud face in the hands of its valley. I have heard the stars weeping, and been crippled by compassion for the wounded rose of blood, all the petals and eyelids and tongues that have tasted themselves on the thorn. If I have ever been a lantern on the road, a star you could follow home like a river, a tree that stood over you for the night, a shadow that summoned you into the light, black honey buffed with the flowers of revised constellations taking their seats in the revolutionary parliaments of the night, now I’m a kind of indecipherable braille hanging like black holes and severed chandeliers of pleading cherries beseeching wicks and filaments from astringent space. Look at what life has done to me; look at what happened to the candle. O just once more to yearn like the moon for a beginning, for an eyeless passion that hasn’t seen itself out to the end like a ladder of worn thresholds ribbed like a man. I have drunk from the fountains of great teachers, great spirits, enormous suggestions of the soul that have emptied me like the echo of the world into a vastness as impersonal as the first word of creation and I have tried to be brave enough to see deeply into the night in my voice, the clarities and luminosities that have their seasons in the high fields, the wells that lament the aging of the morning brides torn like tents, the cocoons of the light abandoned like the exhalation of a last breath, I have tried to add my understanding like a planet that could thrive like a torch in a mansion of secret wines. I have tried to say whatever I was becoming without wringing the moonlight out of the tide. I have not lied about the poppies in their dream gowns of evanescent fire; or transgressed the humble shrines of the grass, or forgotten the progress of the girl robed in swans and willows in the eyes of the crone. And I have been withered too much by suffering to be flattered by the tendril of my name growing like smoke on the lips of the seeds. I assumed my throne like a pauper where the fire burned the clearest, and established the realm of my seeing in the crumb of a dream I rubbed from my eyes whenever I awoke to the illimitable domains of my nothingness. And I have counted the prophetic skulls of the demon moons as if they were a forbidden rosary that pearled the darkness, and been amazed at my affinity for the hopelessness of their vilified freedom. I sleep with an eyelash like a sword between myself and evil, one fuse unlit, one world that hasn’t gone off like a rocket at Halloween. But when I consider true goodness in others, cooling like sweet bread on the summer starsills of their openness, I am always left feeling dangerously intelligent by contrast, and lacking, as if all modes of virtue were the happy sluglines of compromised yesterdays I use to start fires in an iron heart on a winter morning. Though I be condemned to the subtleties of the most intimate torments, incommunicable agonies of erosive condemnation, there is still a lie I won’t tell myself to be worthy of heaven, because I will not dust the earth with my wings, I will not corrupt the integrity of the suffering of my humanity with any paradise that isn’t born of its substance. I will not fail the rag of my poor flesh even on the eve of defeat, the tattered sail of blood that turns this boat of bones into the wind to come round again in a salvo of ferocious defiance. A gesture of the air, no doubt; a lethal folly, but the plank of my nature. So keep your angels away from me until I am a peer of the struggle, until I have won a parity from intensities I could never defeat. Until my humanity is an indelible word in the mouth of God, an ink, a wine, a thread of blood, that stains the lips of God with the inexplicable mystery of my contradictory existence. So much undergone, so much of becoming and transcendence embodied and dissolved in the shapes of shadow, blood and water, and love through it all, tears and laughter, the mingling of illumination and eclipse, one firefly of the spirit thawing glaciers and fierce eras of brutal evolution, one thought snuffing the stars like an eyelid. I love the heresy of vaulting the horns of the moon, the first and last crescents of the dilemmic parentheses that enclose me like an aside to an actor prompted offstage by the whisper of his own understudy dying ambiguously in the very next scene. What’s a flower, what’s a life, but a play on tour, directed by the cuts and takes of the wind and the light? Everyone in the audience, alive and wounded, sentenced, is on death row where every star that shines through the bars is the sprinkling syringe of a fatal injection, or the motherlode of the mystically deranged.

I miss you. I could love you so perfectly; even the errors in harmony. I could be the pillar of a temple of water; I could be sufficient for your sake, a curtain of shadows on the moon to cool the hot swan of the light that sails through a window wide as space. I could be something more in your presence, something I’ve never been before; the whole cosmos out to the most estranged star, hanging like a drop of water from a heron’s beak, a witching-wand that trembles with watersheds everytime it divines you. I think of gently taking the moon in my teeth, of kissing you on the neck behind your ear, of the season in your hair, the supple concession of your lips, undoing the star yokes on the beast that draws the wagon of this corpse to wander off road in the bestial freedom of its ecstatic vagrancy. I could know you like a fish knows the moon, underwater, could swim to you from here, or rise to your hooks as if they were stars, and swallow, or be a dragon heaving off its lake like a robe of water with wildflowers and the open eyes of the rain shaken from the folds of the eclipses and eras of its wings. You could empower me to risk an excruciating excellence of devotion; an eloquence and exquisitivity of perception that would compel my eye to turn the light around and look inwards like a black hole for the firefly in the casket of its telescope. However far I walked through a desert of lunar salt, excoriated by ferocious purities like a bone with the wind for marrow, no two footprints of mine would ever be the same, nor would the moon, so much like the heart, ever drink its own commingling of light and shadow from the same cup twice. I think of the things that could be; the air saturated with light trying to fall like rain; the blood efflorescent with poppies, with gypsy profligates, outraging the startled goodness of the wheat by dancing lasciviously with fire. Out of the air, out of space, out of time, living on nothing, I can almost make you happen before me like an event so intensely imagined the curtain had to open on a troupe of improv stars on tour among the constellations. The abyss of an eyelash away, I can almost touch you, taste you, feel you reach out for me like a bay of space, hear you call my name like a homing bird sliding like love-letter under the doorsill of the wind. Grief can call people like that, but it is love that is the gate-mouth of my answering, it is love that conjures you out of this galactic cauldron where I cannot pull this sword of light from the stone of my heart like a letter without bleeding like a crimson sea of candlewax to verify the seal of your enthronement in the kiss of every impression. The truth is too brief, and the lies are too long to be the suitable luggage of love. I’d need something like a seed, a cocoon, an eye, a lantern, a star to travel radiantly through this darkness as fragile as a kite held aloft by a feather of fire, my spinal cord in your hands, or strung across the musical snakepit of a lifeboat guitar like a powerline, or a clown riding the bicycle of his glasses. The seas once gone from the moon, love alone can keep the whisper of water alive.

I saw the full moon in the window through black winter branches, and I thought of you in sadness and love, and wondered if your eyes fell upon it like rain as mine did.

PATRICK WHITE

O SWEET FREEDOM


O SWEET FREEDOM

O sweet freedom to be nothing for awhile.
To blindfold the clock
with its own shadow
like a masked bandit
and let it get away with something for a change.
I love the cheap thrill
of feeling like a thief
with an ageless sense of timing.
One tug on my serpentine spinal cord
and I unplug my electric identity
like a searchlight
that keeps its eye on me
like a blackhole it doesn’t know anything about.
I’ve stopped looking for meaning
in the flight of the doves
I release from their cages
like words stuck in the throats
of Selkirk chimneys
like harps and hearts and wishbones.
The joy of a liberated dove
I’m out!
seems to be enough of a rapture
to give meaning to the spontaneous outburst
of an enlightened universe
as if it had just broken through
to the other side
of its own koan
like an iron cosmic egg.
Like a Rinzai master shouting Katsu!
and throwing down his horse-hair hossu.
Like me sitting here
in the middle of a small heritage town
without feeling I’m one of the original fieldstones
of the bank across the street.
O the sweet freedom
to let the waters of life
take great liberties with my roots
to let whatever flowers in the wild starfields
hidden in the white darkness of noon
bloom as they will
and whatever comes to fruition fall
like the stroke of midnight
beheading the clock on the wall
so Cinderella
doesn’t have to hurry home from the ball.
Not to be.
Not to see.
Not to do anything
that wasn’t already done in the first place
and all the bonds that baffled the dawn
with too many horizons to overcome
undo themselves like vapour trails in the sunset
and I’m as free as space
to be ubiquitiously anywhere at once.
I don’t need to eat through the bone of one leg
caught in a trapline
to free the other.
I don’t have to go mad
trying to kill myself
to save myself from death.
I don’t have to be shamed by mirrors
that bear false witness
against my own reflection.
I can look at my own face
and casually ruminate
about whether it matters
that either of us is here or not.
I can be lead astray by poems
that come on like gold rushs
but end in lead
like the philosopher’s stone
and still be intrigued by the passion
of getting there
without worrying about
finding my way back alone.
Inside every man of great renown
is a frustrated clown
that takes him far too seriously.
I have laboured like an ox
to keep grinding out starwheat
on the millstone of the daily grind
but comes a time
when you sit down on the ground
among the grain and the chaff
exhausted by your fruitless attempt
to turn your mind
into loaves and fishs for the multitudes
and have a good laugh
at your own expense
when you see how few people
are truly hungry enough to eat.
How many are dying of thirst
beside a freshwater lake.
Open your mouth and eat.
Roll over and drink.
And go read Eccclesiastes
if you want to know why.
Mithras Tauroctonus the bull-killer
can put all the horns on the silo he wants
like the first and last crescents of the cornucopias
on a harvest moon.
I’m at large in the zodiac
playing with poppies
as if I were slaying matadors
that flare like scarlet capes in my blood.
Moon.
One.
Sun.
Nothing.
The thistle bristles with swords.
Van Gogh cuts off his own ear
and gives it to a brothel rose
as if that were the only way she could hear
his endearing words
as if that little gesture of the heart
were the beginning of expressionist art
or the artist as mummy
if you stretch your canvases like bandages
and mistaking yourself for a model
paint with them on
to keep your blood
from running into the colours
like a red sky in the morning
that doesn’t give you any warning
though Gaugin was sailor enough to know that
and beat a hasty retreat back to Tahiti.
O sweet freedom
not to have to whitewash
the truth of the graffiti under the bridge
with the genocidal lies of scripture
that paint in blood
with the same brush
they use to sweep whole nations
under the rug.
I kick the empty spraycan of my heart
down the road
like the hollow shell casing
of a losing revolution.
In order to establish
my vision of life
I had to overthrow my eyes
to justify the way I see things.
Been alone so long
it looks like love to me.
I don’t know how else to explain this
to the winners who doubt my word
except I’m a loser in bliss
for reasons you’d find absurd.
Not to have slammed the door in my face
just as it was opening
would have been a complete and utter disgrace
to the people who were waiting to be impressed.
My future’s just another afterlife
that hasn’t been made aware
of my arrival.
Still I have a lot more fun
getting around as a pauper
than I ever did a prince.
I have no interest at all
at dying in line
to inherit a dead man’s office.
I’ve learned to get along
on my insufficiency just fine
by mimicking the appetites
of a self-exiled poetic refugee
with the aristocratic poverty
of an intellectual past
and the emotional life
of the last dynast of my homeless ancestors
none of whom made it this far.
O sweet freedom
not to be related to anything
like the key to someone’s heart
lying in the grass at the side of a road
that no one’s taken in years.
You can answer the call.
You can respond to a summons.
But my calling’s
the falling of mirrors
that have run out of tears
like doorbells
that don’t cry hard enough to be sincere.
Some I smash like a pinata.
Al Capone with a baseball bat.
And others come crashing down like chandeliers
that thought they were better organized
than what appeared to be
a minor uprising
of disordered angry stars.
I take a broom to the cobwebs of the constellations
and sweep their reflections
like bad imitations
of outmoded myths
from the mirror.
I like to keep things clear
between me and the light
so there’s no duplicity in what I see
and no darkness in the night
that can claim to be the ancient shadow
of my spontaneous lucidity
without cooking their fire-bug phoenix
in its own flames.
The fire god comes looking for fire.
But I don’t spend much time
dwelling on the event
like a fire-hydrant in a cathedral
afraid of falling into hell.
I’ve fallen down hilariously drunk
sipping mystic elixirs
from my own skull
as if it were the holy grail
but I’ve never gotten off on
drinking from a bell
that keeps pouring me out on the ground
like bad wine
that didn’t turn into sacred blood.
O sweet freedom
what a treat
not to meet me in my solitude.
Not to lead people
like a starmap
that puts them on the wrong track
so they can learn their own way back
through all the labyrinths and lightyears
they’ve been away
and though they might recognize
the old place as home
it’s not the same threshold,
the doors don’t answer
to their names anymore
and the windows have forgotten their faces
like phases of the moon
that bloomed and passed
like warm breath on cold glass.
I have looked at the stars
and sweetened the night air with wonder
that we both collaborate
in exploring the mystery of our being here
without knowing why.
The question longs
to experience the answer
the way a dancer longs for music
to go with the words
or a painter tries to explain the light
to his eyes.
But not two is the closest anyone can get
to knowing the world from the inside out
and the silence is polyglot
not a universal language
and what it can’t define
it expresses.
Seeing paints its own eyes
on the prow of a lifeboat
that’s been washed out to sea
with nobody in it
and nothing to save
but these endless waves of moonlight
swimming through stone
like ancient hieroglyphs
for water and fish
adrift in a desert of stars.
The intimate personal history
of the mystery in each one of us
the way the same moon
is cherished by every rosary
and millions of lockets of dew
as if it could only be known by you alone
like the absence of a lover far away
that brings you closer together.
Seeing doesn’t belong to the eye
anymore than a house belongs to the hammer
that built it
or the mind
to the starmud foundation stone of the brain
that laid it like a cosmic egg
in a phoenix’ nest.
There’s more to insight than meets the eye.
O sweet freedom
even one of your mirages
is more than enough
to appease the lightning with fireflies.
My feelings have never looked for sanctuary
in a safe heart
because the best place to hide
is out in the open
where the sea doesn’t run from its own weather
and the night isn’t overwhelmed
by a riot of stars
smashing every telescopic lens in sight
like the priest of a false god
with only one eye.
O sweet freedom
to be the only rodeo clown
in the annual funeral march of martyred icons
parading down Gore Street
with a police escort
and red lights screaming
like an ambulance
going through withdrawal
trying to overcome its addiction to poppies.
I breathe time
and burn my fingers in the eternal flame
of my blood playing with a fire it couldn’t put out.
God might not love me yet
not recognizing the genius
of her own work
but that doesn’t mean
I’m any less of a masterpiece
than any of these other jerks
or that I don’t know how
to conduct myself accordingly.
It’s just that you won’t find me
hanging out in a gallery
or behind the cover of a book
with my shirt off
as if that were really
all I had to say.
It’s not a sign of true freedom
if your zodiac is still under house arrest.
Or you’re still sending
that old refrain of madness to school
to learn to sing in the dulcet tones of a lucid voice
on pheaobarbitol.
Success is the quickest way to underwhelm yourself.
Ripeness kicks the stool from under the apple.
Failure has more enduring effects.
A dead tree can lie down longer
like the hull of a ship
than a strong rafter
can stand up
like a mast on the bridge.
You might take matters
like the wheel of birth and death
into your firm hands
and try to weather the storm
like a feather in a hurricane
but the waters of life
still slip through your fingers
like stars and clouds and rain
and your grasp on any rival circumstance
that might threaten your survival.
The dispossessed are freer than those
that are standing in line
waiting for their own arrival.
O sweet freedom
not to send my thoughts out like missionaries
to preach to the dissipated
the importance of staying in focus.
Not to go divining the source of the light
with a prism
that enshrines its Catholic colours
in see-through Protestant glass.
There are no sundogs
under my atheist eyes.
I don’t project what I believe
like an eye-beam on a dark world
and expect to be conceived
like the image of God
as if I was born
the way I appear
from a cracked mirror.
I slip through the fault-lines
on the palms of my hands
like a hero plunging
into a gaping abyss
with legendary decorum
to save Rome from an earthquake in the Forum.
And O sweet freedom
that there’s nothing sacrificial
about taking my own advice not to.
And no disappointed expectations.
Age disappears.
Origin disappears.
End disappears.
Being without disclosure.
Seeing without design.
Emptiness without intent.
No I
or its opposite.
And nowhere a sign
of what someone somewhere once meant.
Less than empty
a measure more than enough
to keep one tiny human heart
as perishable as a strawberry
full to eternity
with the sweetness of life on earth
when there’s no birth
no death
in the taste of the moment.

PATRICK WHITE