I'VE SEEN WHAT CAN HAPPEN TO PEOPLE IN LIFE

I’VE SEEN WHAT CAN HAPPEN TO PEOPLE IN LIFE

I’ve seen what can happen to people in life,

the broken man, his lack of will not a decision he made,

the crying child no one answered, the woman

who realized her marriage was a post-mortem effect.

Loneliness and misunderstanding so vehement,

separation so cruel, though people were only

a razor-blade apart, adolescents grown psychotically geriatric

with disappointment, yesterday’s victors who saved the world

dismantled erosively like rust in dry dock, casualties

of having lived so intensely for awhile for one another,

the best steel that went through the forge of war

is beaten into ploughshares that till the moon alone

like scars that were sown, but nothing came up

because of the salt that was thrown in the wounds of Carthage.

Good people, innocent, resplendent as Monarchs

among the lilacs in the spring, the kindness of souls

that would give an evil man a moment’s pause,

just enough of a taste of what it means to be human,

not to regret what he is, nor long for what he’ll never be

for another ten thousand lifetimes yet, but intrigued

by being at peace with his own nature as if nothing mattered,

absolutely nothing, everything achieved by just being here

to watch the swept-winged swallows scramble

to intercept the dusk like top guns among the gnats

in aerial combat with the Bolshoi Ballet. Utterly destroyed

by a whimsicality that challenges you to find a reason

it’s more merciful to lie about, than believe in.

Modes of suffering. Tones, wishbone, tuning forks

that can shatter a voice-box with a ballerina on top

like glass, elaborations of the atrocities with

university educations, that can come of knowledge

without love, green apples and gripe, with no idea

what the frost and sunlight can do to sweeten their attitude,

sharp-edged humans that can slash mirrors with their smiles,

for whom wonder and awe, even in the face

of their own awareness, never appeal to the acquisition

of manipulative facts because they don’t confer power

on anyone. Graces of the imagination, Venus,

delinquently radiant in the sunset above the shopping mall,

fireflies in a valley of fog after a thunderstorm

as the stars come out to consult them like a think tank

for innovative constellations, and the richness of the air

redolent with life, as the earth releases a fragrance

you can almost see with your eyes, more indelible

than the sickly sweetness of death. Sentient delights,

raptures of awareness, the inconceivable joys of intelligence

chasing its own tail without a purpose to its play.

I’ve witnessed and experienced these things every day

and even on many eyeless nights of my life when I could see

but couldn’t say what I was looking at because it was cloaked.

I’m not unmindful of how much kids like sugar.

How everyone yearns to live a life of happiness

they never tire of, love, as if it had pride of place

in the periodic table, a sine qua non of the elements

that sat down together around the sacred fire

at the joining of many rivers they’ve travelled down

from the mountain, assured of their dreams of the sea.

Peace-pipes all around, three osprey feathers in their hair.

But there’s an inviolability to suffering that puts a scar

to shame, an eye on a snake that doesn’t blink

even if you turn away from it like a disconsolate flute

that gives up trying to make it dance, gamma ray bursts

of experience that eradicate anything in its path,

that bury you so deeply in your sense of life,

you could open up a private school for meteor showers

and avalanches assiduously scribbling down notes

like the last words of a guru that entered satori,

but never came out of the coma again though

he talked incoherently in his sleep as if he

were chattering with squirrels and pileated woodpeckers.

I’ve seen starlings nest in death bells they feed

like the open mouths of the morning glory

even as they’re tamping down the soil on the grave

of a man they just buried like a potato in his own starmud.

I’ve seen the lowest snatched like a baby rattler

right out of the cosmic egg bite the highest flying eagle

with the keenest insight right in the leg because

it forgot that innocence can be as toxic as experience

especially when you’re trying to put a dragon on the road

that’s oxymoronically immune to the quantum entanglements

of the moon baring her fangs like a gateway drug to bliss

you can’t teach other people to run from like an anti-venom

to the rush of the thrill coursing through a nervous system

like a root fire of white lightning slowly killing you

with a tinfoil facsimile of a less enlightened life that nevertheless

shines brighter than Lucifer showing the Buddha the morning star,

doesn’t it, admit it now, o my brother, my sister of the moment, confess.

I wrote once I seek the eventual forgiveness of the dark.

Not that it needed to be. But it was a place to start. And

by dark I don’t mean the ghoulish antics of teenagers

digging up corpses like dogs in the cemeteries of Smith Falls

and smearing black lipstick across their mouths. Ooo, bad,

black bubbles without rainbows, anti-heroes of the dead,

do you ever get the bends when you’re coming up

from the Gothic depths of all your ruined cathedrals?

Do things pop like a weasel when you gore your thumb

on a real thorn you hadn’t anticipated like a cotton mouth

under the rosebushes someone planted around an otherwise

unremarkable gravestone? Got some advice

that probably won’t do you any good to absorb

but don’t cheapen the dark and it won’t take you so lightly.

When you’re thinking positively you can be sure

there’s some negativity inciting it like a chthonic muse

pouring blood libations over the body parts

of the king of the waxing year before he evolved

a symbolic imagination. Tropical islands owe a lot

to the slag of volcanoes. You can’t dis the chrysalis

without diminishing the lustre of what comes out of it.

What fool ignores the bud as any less of an event

in the life of a flower than a total eclipse

is integral to the art of being the full moon.

Panning for asteroids or the amino acids of life

it’s always wise to start with the ore. Given time

diamonds can come of dandelions, a star sapphire

light up like enlightenment in the crystal skull of corundum.

Accord the same integrity to pain as you do to joy.

Like the night sea in an unexpected storm

learn to respect your own weather by turning

the wheel over to the waves like a pilot you trust

as much as chaos to navigate by the stars a way

to pass between the whirlpools and rocks of yourself

unscathed by the windfalls of anchors and liferafts

you’ve dropped in the water like the fruits

of what you want to be known by, inverse crucifixes

attached to chains, the first crack of light

under the eyelid of the new moon to wake up in time

to greet the ice burg like a white whale you’re growing

spiritually fond of like the enigmatic co-sponsor

of a salvageable doom as a prequel to the aftermath

of the dangerous, rosey-fingered dawn keeping you afloat

one plank of your lifeboat at a time as if

you were always slumped like a half-drowned, mystic drunk

your life flashing before your eyes like fireflies in Andromeda

on the thresholds of your interminable homelessness.

PATRICK WHITE