MY LITTLE BOOK'S OUT THERE BEING READ

MY LITTLE BOOK’S OUT THERE BEING READ

My little book’s out there being read by someone

I hope somewhere like the plank of a shipwreck

with my name on it, the flyleaf of an artificial coral reef,

you gotta go deep, you gotta drown your book

on the moon, an underwater, island, barrow tomb

so you can bury your death in the life it gave shelter to.

Hey, little fish, welcome to my wake. I won’t say

I sank for your sake, but, here, where my oracular bones

are being pearled at the bottom of the Sea of Tranquillity,

it’s good to see you thriving as if evolution

were a high end colourist with a mad palette of hotspots

and at night, schools of argent insights emerging

in moonlight like the leaves of the wind in

the silver, Russian olives that lyrically mentored me on earth.

And, you, squirmy worm, literrateur, you can tunnel

through me like a blind, star-nosed mole boring

black holes for what was most illuminating about me

to leak out of like the shadows of the shadows you see

as you follow the crumbs of the feast deeper into

the labyrinth you’ll never come to the end of

like a wandering scholar following its tail back to its mouth,

the spitting image of a vicious, disappointed sentimentalist.

Have a happy. The party’s on me. Knock yourself out.

Can’t you hear the moon bawling like a large mammal

from the ice age in a tarpit on the dark side of life?

My little book’s out there being read

like the poetic genome of some potentially

extinct species of some hominid who knew

it wouldn’t be long before he was the last of his kind,

and spit-painted his handprint like the negative

of a silhouette he never coloured in with lifelines

like a starmap that might have led the gypsy palmists

astray like a ghost with a candelabra in an open doorway.

My little book’s out there, indelible as hardback and ink,

sporting the vision of life I once wore like constellations

tattooed on my eyes so my tears couldn’t wash them out

like the flood myth of a watercolour I never meant.

My little book’s out there shining like a fossil

in the eyes of the graverobbers on the black market

of the Burgess Shale of my sedimentary starmud,

indexed in the Dewey Decimal System in the library

of Ashurbanipal. Cosmetic scalpels like the birdsfeet

of sandpipers scarring the lyrics of their song

in wounded clay left out to bake in the kiln of the sun.

It’s healthy to mock yourself like the fool

at the foot of a throne the peasant’s revolt in you

was always inclined to abdicate like a gravestone

after Richard the Second lied to Wat Tyler in l381.

Even if you’ve made a sacred clown of yourself

doesn’t mean you can’t have a little fun

in a dans macabre with death when it takes you

way too seriously like a terminal literalist who expects

you to mean everything you express as if

you weren’t just skywriting among the stars

like a ghost declaring how much it loved so and so,

no boundary stones like the prophetic skulls

of the turf wars we make of our global evanescence.

My little book’s out there somewhere, a petal of flame

that blooms in fire once every seven thousand years

like the pine-cone pagoda of a Zen monastery

with its one good eye on enlightenment, and the other

on the shadows of God it casts like gravegoods into the abyss.

Nothing more rapturous than an heretical arsonist

being burnt at the stake of his own auto de fe

like a scapegoat on the pyre of a left-handed sacrifice

as the anti-venom to the toxic innocence of the orthodox

who purify themselves like smallpox among the natives,

guilt by infection. Better to eat your own ashes in hell

than contaminate your neighbour’s spiritual housewell

with the decaprified horns of the goatsheads

that poison the waters of life with lies about the clarity

of waterlilies festering like nuns in virgin swamps.

I’ve never had an agenda for what I wanted to achieve

when I fell in love like a hole in the road on my way

to someone else, as if I had an errand to run that

my life and death depended on arriving in time

with news of the misdiagnosis of everything

I thought was wrong with me in a gnostic moment

that turned me into a happy docetist in the urn

of old papyri buried in a cave until a goatherd came along

and woke me up like a genie in a lamp

burning like serpent fire in the snakeoil

milked from the paps of Medusan amphorae

as if there’d been a mass mastectomy of breasts

that could kill as easily as they healed the visionary fevers

of the poetically snakebit. My little book is out there

somewhere like a binary star system doing

a ghost dance around a firepit that blossoms

like the eternal flame at the sacred forks

where the sacred rivers join like the tines

of a snake’s-tongue searching the air like lightning

for someone to strike like a root-fire of revelation.

Until the autumn oak breaks into a conflagration of leaves

how else can you shake a windfall of acorns down to earth

for the wild boars to keep growing the tusks of the moon

you’ll have to pay death one night for your passageway

to the other side of your unsalvageable Orphic descents?

My little book’s out there somewhere like a liferaft

in an hourglass with nobody on it, riding the thought waves

of strange seas of awareness where the stars

go pearl diving and come up with the moon.

The same mindstream I was carried along on

like an autumn leaf, cutting through a stranger’s woods.

Flightfeather of a book in a gust of stars like Cygnus

that can open its wings and fly like a cross

or land a high dive like a wild swan on a river,

threading the eye of the needle between an eagle

and a flying horse. My little book’s nocturnal

but it’s not morose. Aesthetically infernal, but not an urn.

PATRICK WHITE