MY PAST WHEN IT TURNS ME AROUND LIKE THE LIGHT

MY PAST WHEN IT TURNS ME AROUND LIKE THE LIGHT

My past when it turns me around like the light

to compel me to look back upon it

like a mountain the valley it dug like its own grave

I’m ascending out of, an Orphic ghost from the underworld

empty-handed with a habitable solitude for a companion,

Hermes, my sole pilot light and messenger,

seems like a Sufi patchwork of purple passages

winging it like a multiverse of flying carpets

or the sudden emergence of birds from the summer wood

trying to synchronize themselves to the same flightplan

membranous wavelengths in creative hyperspace are on.

Sometimes I disturb the graves of old books I’ve published

in a cemetery of shelves, and I flip through pages

and pages of sedimentary starmud, refleshing fossils

with mnemonic stem cells at a seance of yesterdays.

Time’s running out of itself, and then who knows what

flips the polarities of the hourglass and death

reserves a garden just for you to return to

as your body relaxes like candle wax letting go

of the coffin you posed for. The empire you were

comes undone, does it not?--- fragments, and the feudal warlords

that are heir to your last dynasty, plague rats on crusade,

jump ship in Genoa, and splinter like true relics

of the skeleton they nailed you to like an albatross

to a crossbow. The arrow of time is the measure

of the spatial distances between order and entropy,

the direction all flowers are perishing in like the quibla

of existence aligned like the stillness of the North Star

with the provisional polarities of chaos. The stars

are disappearing like beauty marks on a mythically inflated balloon

that’s got to pop sooner or later like a weasel

chasing its tail around a prickly pear, given

how addicted conceptual ratiocination is to thorns.

What kind of an afterlife longs to live forever, impersonally?

I’ve held the abyss closer to my heart than that.

And I’ve got the bloodlines of these ancient poems

to prove it, though I still remain the missing link

of all I wrote back then as if my life depended on it.

Who could have guessed, the way the mindstream wends

and the heart bobs along in it like an apple

in the mouth of a prophetic skull poetically dismembered

like a prescient addition to a superstitious family,

I’d be standing at this bend in the road of ghosts

looping back on myself like the retrograde motion

of the false idol of the shadow I cast across my path

I eventually caught up to and passed like a somnambulant

Knights Hospitaler on an emergency offroad pilgrimage

going the wrong way like a light year unaccustomed

to the country dark my eyes hadn’t adjusted to

like a starmap blazing high overhead. Timing is

at least as important as content, and the rest

is just the corpse of an excuse you enshrine

as a learning experience you can chalk up

like the white cliffs of Dover to the size of the blackboard

you had to learn on like the Burgess Shale.

Hail, fellow, well met in the flea markets of poetic vision.

The muse hasn’t remaindered me yet.

And the daughters of memory dance upon my grave

as lightly as they ever did. I still prefer

the nacreous midnights of black pearls in the silks

of the northern lights to the opalescent dawns

of the abalone shells that smile like jewels of milk

when the moon is in the clouds and the stars

shine down upon the earth like pale imitations of the real thing.

I once thought I knew the man who wrote these lines

as if I experienced more of him than I could ever

know at the time, or now, once I gave up asking

what’s gone, why, or the approach of the dawn,

bluing the windows with unobtrusive skies

that kept to themselves like lapis lazuli damselflies

with bruised eyelids ripe as plums, when.

If all I’ve done over the course of a lifetime

in these wild starfields is bring a small bouquet

of poppies enflamed by a gust of the wind

to this pageant of perishing picture-music

on the midway of a game of show and tell,

is it the gut of a spinal cord tautly strung out

like a highwire act across the resonant abyss

of an empty tortoise shell, or a compound bow

muscled with bone? Despair, never a welcome house guest,

o the times I wrote into the wind trying to bridge the gap

between water and its mirages like a causeway

of lifeboats the fish had no use for. Still don’t

believe not caring is an effective meme of self defence.

And if the love boat mutinies, so what,

every siren’s got an island of her own

you can be washed up on like salvage of the mystery

all this is taking place after you drowned on the moon.

What I’ve said, let stand. You can’t unsay the dead.

Autumn sheds the Library of Alexandria like leaves

unglued from the perfect binding of its brittle books.

Whether I shall rise out of the ashes of the flames

like a dragon of staghorn sumac, more a thorn

in my own eye than a viper under the rosebush,

or I’ll be blessed by the fire for the heretical attitudes

I took toward the unctious beatitudes of entrenched hypocrisy,

no matter. Write reductio ad absurdum on my gravestone.

If I wouldn’t lie on my deathbed, why make a liar

out of my epitaph? If the dawn was false

what are the chances of being able to trust the dusk?

PATRICK WHITE