ASKED WHAT I WANTED TO BE I'LL SAY

ASKED WHAT I WANTED TO BE I’LL SAY

Asked what I wanted to be I’ll say

this is my achievement just as it is,

what I am, counterintuitively second-guessing

whatever this is. What else can a river say

winding its way across the moon

seeking fulfilment in an abyss it’s trying

to fill like a heart-stopping waterclock

that knows it will never catch up

to its own emptiness, but what the hell,

at least you can die knowing you tried

the impossible, you failed at something crucial?

The lovely green-blonde willows are leaning

like a rain storm out over Stewart Lake

and there’s a galactic rush of creation

in the small rapids of the Tay River

coming at me on this hard park bench

as if God were revelling in squandering her talents

just to empower the glee of knowing she can

transcend herself like the one returning to the many

through a million suns dancing on the wavelengths of her eyes.

God’s her own worst heretic and the last

I’d entrust a secret to given how she hides things

out in the open where everybody could see them

if they only stopped searching long enough to look.

Feel free to fill in your own pseudomorphic image

or colour outside of the lines as you wish, tattoo

a starmap on your eyes or howl like a moondog

or a tree ring there’s no green bough in your heart

for a red-winged black bird to perch on anymore

and startle you with the beauty of how

long you’ve forgotten how well it can sing.

When you’re sitting in the sunshine and you don’t want

to be an ignorant eclipse and punch a black hole

like a pupil in the evanescent radiance of the scene,

as the wild irises yearn for the colour of your eyes,

open your fist and try to live like a flower does

not knowing what brought you to bloom

but shining back at the stars nevertheless.

People, dogs, and lovers on the Little Rainbow Bridge,

and I don’t know if I’m dreaming this or not

or if some occult imagination anticipated me

before I happened like a sign of the continuous forthcoming

of the waters of life that have metaphorized me like a mindstream

as my vaporous sensibilities wander off into oblivion

beyond the boundary stones of my prophetic skulls

popping up overnight like mushrooms and moonrises

from the death valley of stars I buried them in

to temper the white lightning of my self-annihilating insights

into the heartwood of a rootless tree like a firefly

in a miasmic cloud of incorrigible unknowing

waiting to see what incomprehensively appears all by itself.

That’s a rush, I know, but if you don’t say it fast

you begin to lie. My space-time continuum’s

deranged at the speed of thought but that doesn’t mean

the shore-huggers see more than those

who flow along with the stream do whether

they’re overturned in the whitewater of their tears

or liferafting down the spring run off of the Milky Way,

what did Dogen Zenji write about how much

we can know about human life---no more

than the reflection in a water droplet on a heron’s beak?

It’s doubtful we’ll ever be able to speak to each other

in the same voice we’re listening to in the solitude

of the silence within, but ask yourself in the slang

of your own indecipherable mother-tongue, because

everyone’s caught in the same crossfire of life

ricocheting off the waters like a quantumly entangled multiverse

of noetic dark matter looking for the light,

in your own inner voice so the furthest galaxy

can hear you like a gamma ray burst of fierce insight,

in this spiritual lost and found, do you still seek solace

from the dumb-founded echoes of your own voice

or have you given up, assented to the silence, and begun to rejoice?

PATRICK WHITE