THE JOURNEY ITSELF

THE JOURNEY ITSELF

The journey itself changes the nature of the destination

until it is so unrecognizable that the notion

of ever arriving is as absurd as waiting for a star

to catch up to its own light. Poetry’s like that,

and love no less than life: Transmute the wayfarer!

Transmute the wayfarer! If you want to preserve

the remains. I’m led astray by where I’m going.

I don’t linger at the gates of my own unknowing.

I don’t read starmaps backwards in the mirror.

The orphanage isn’t homeless. The lost and found

isn’t waiting to be discovered. My madness

never greets me like a visiting hour at the asylum.

I send my prophetic skull on ahead of me

like a time capsule into the history of tomorrow

and the future remembers me oracularly as a sign

anything can happen retroactively you didn’t see coming.

Lost in a labyrinth of eyeless windows, the town

sleeps on the nightwatch. The silence purrs

with the white noise of somnambulant machinery.

I never listen to here as if it were the echo

of other places I’ve been. The train whistle mourns

like a ship at sea. Nothing quite so abjectly homeless

as a threshold with a return address. Better

to sleep on the wrong side of the tracks than

lie down with the suicides like a ladder that had given up

not realizing life’s a two way street, one rung east,

a crosswalk west of here, a burning crutch closer to heaven

than shakey Jacob on a three-legged footstool.

There’s no snakey paradise up the sleeves of my pyres,

no burning doves in the urns of my ashes in hell.

I don’t worship in the shrines of their reciprocal fires.

I don’t sing springtime carillons of wild columbine

to a dying funeral bell in winter whether it’s sempiternal

or not. I might light a few candles now and again

but I never extinguish their wicks in my tears

like the pilot lights of burnt out dragons in pain.

Whatever mirrors I might break like plagiarists

of the way I see myself when I reflect on the lack of one

I can trust, I don’t put brand name constellations

on fake creation myths that compromise my starmud

When I go down in flames, I never expect

the sunflowers to bloom at midnight, or noon

to throw a bouquet of shadows it cut from its own garden

into my grave as I’m lowered into my coffin

like the lifeboat of a meteor impact on the moon

into a sea as tranquil and surreal as it is inarticulately alone.

PATRICK WHITE