NOW THAT I'VE GOT MY LITTLE SANDCASTLE OF AN APARTMENT

NOW THAT I’VE GOT MY LITTLE SANDCASTLE OF AN APARTMENT

Now that I’ve got my little sandcastle of an apartment

nearly complete with what I’ve got to work with,

I’ll wait for the tide to wash it all out to sea,

though it’s getting harder every time to begin again.

Ebb and neap. Neap and ebb. A kind of breathing

with a brief pause full of peace just before

it returns to its former state, irrevocably changed.

A pulse, a penumbral eclipse of the Hunter’s moon

in the northern hemisphere. I look for Venus

in the west just after the sun goes down and it

doesn’t really matter if I don’t see it, but if I do,

it always renews my sense of wonder affirmatively

at why I’m making such a fool of myself going

through all this over and over again like

the most recent definition of the insane, looking

for a different effect, irrevocably, as I said, changed.

The poetry lives, but I’m losing interest in a future

that doesn’t include death. I don’t peel

my oranges anymore to get at the fruit of the moon.

It’s bittersweet, but I get the taste of the whole thing.

There’s a moonrise in my soul that works the nightshift.

I haven’t grown any older than my afterbirth

or baby teeth, or the booties my mother had bronzed,

but I’m tired of the north light in my windows

waking me up in the middle of a dream

to find all the birds gone forever with many

of my friends ailing like unhinged gateways

to gardens that never existed except

in their imaginations, though it isn’t compassion

to say so, or speak ill of the weeds. Find

what a human cherishes the most and you’ll

be amazed how few metaphors it clings to

like crown jewels for an apocalyptic coronation.

Corona Borealis soon overhead, and Gemma,

the jewel, shining like a maiden voyage

in the window of a tower in the whirling castle

of the Celts who spent their afterlife in Arianrhod.

Don’t look it up if you don’t have a mind to,

or freebase your own associations as if your face

just caught fire thinking about it. Out of

my comprehension now as I watch my erudition

slip away like a thief in the night that’s left me

inconceivably at the mercy of my own resources.

As if that were something new to labour at

like turning coal into diamond, darkness into

six months of the midnight sun out of the ore

of six more months of noon in total eclipse.

Of making my longing beautiful before

the unanswerable as if I were making the best

of my house arrest here on the earth until

I learn the knack of wearing an ankle bracelet

as a crown in the kingdom of freedom where

the poets reign an an eye to eye basis

of lunar calendars with cosmic views

of their mindscape abandoned in

the shabby kitchen of a collapsing farmhouse

where they grew up to get away as fast as they could

with curtains torn like spiderwebs littered

with the empty exoskeletons of the stars

scattered like ashes from their urns on nothing,

nothing at all, the cold chimney of a dead fire,

with their creatively ungovernable state of chaos

delegitimized by the lack of laws it made up

just to break to show you how to thrive on nothing.

PATRICK WHITE