THE RELENTLESS INDIFFERENCE OF THE WORLD

THE RELENTLESS INDIFFERENCE OF THE WORLD

The relentless indifference of the world

to the monkeys who think they’re in charge.

How does a human skull not rot like a feral dog’s

killed by wolves? Babies die like a carillon

of columbine above their cribs. I see

through the camouflage of my little hill

of a vantage point, ants on the Ho Chi Min Trail

carrying away the piecemeal wings of the butterfly

for scrap metal spare airplane parts. We’re

on the menus of all other forms of life.

Poachers would kill the white elephant

of the moon for its tusks, black bears

for their medicinal livers, stem cells for body parts.

All branches of knowledge, frayed ends

of the lightning unwinching its bucket of rain

on the root fires of dendritic axons in the garden.

Dark matter perishing into its moment

of radiant flowering like English ox-eyed daisies

and stars. Maybe being born into this world

is the shallow death of a black hole in labour?

As much of the elm underground as there is above.

Six million leaves in the beaming sunshine

feeding the dark that scatters them like birds

from a fountain, words from a poet’s mouth

that grow old and die like solar panels erected

on the far side of the moon that lives on starlight alone.

Death can be as useful as roadkill to a turkey vulture.

Hominids lapping marrow for bigger brains

from the charnel houses of the predators

they most fear when they risk extermination

out of the trees being culled by the encroaching grasslands.

Everybody’s too busy running from it

to look death straight in the eye to see

deeply into the black mirror they can’t find

their reflection in, as if you couldn’t shine

without a shadow telling you what time it is.

If I lose my eyes do you think that will

bring about subtle, but lasting changes in the light

adjusting the filaments and stamens of the way

things flower for reasons you were meant to take

as a guess you could build on like a tent

with a portable threshold like a meandering crosswalk

instead of institutionalizing your creation myths?

I have an innate mistrust of the lies that back up

certainty, including the lie behind the alibis

of the tenured sceptic. Dubito ergo sum. Doesn’t

leave you much of a leg to stand on

like a mountain village gathering foundation stones

from the last earthquake. Or a Mongolian

pyramid of skulls promising you an afterlife

to assuage your surrender. Some are washed

in the blood of the lamb and some the goat.

What was pagan about the Romans who bathed

in the blood of a bull? I wash in my own tears

and that’s as close to capitulation as I ever get.

No doubt I may be about to blend into the Great Mystery

with a lot of regret, but, to hear my mother tell it,

I wasn’t too happy when I got here anyway,

and except for a few malignant Catholics who

imputed sin to my original nature, if, in fact,

that’s where things begin, I was innocent as far as it goes

in a world that cuts off its nose to extol

the righteousness of its toes in an infantile mouth.

May be a blessing. May be a curse. Maybe

one foot in the boat, one on shore, and a topknot

tied to a low hanging bough on the tree of life

like a ghost with a dislocated hip and a limp.

Who cares? The river’s running full out of the garden,

and the leaves are better poets than the wind

ever imagined them to be according to modern standards.

They don’t seek awards for the folly of their calling.

They don’t keep track of the anthologies of foliage

they’ve been published in. They just give themselves up

to the mad genius of the wind like the flames

of wax candelabra in diaspora that don’t equate death,

like seeds, with exile. The harvest moon in the hands

of the sower without the plough of the Big Dipper

to show her how. And yet there’s grain in the arms

of the Virgin as if her lover were a scarecrow,

driving its equally innocent twin of a scapegoat

further and further out into a wilderness

where the six and eight pointed stars

thrive on the trash of the universe recycling itself.

Maybe I’ll be the reason sacred dung beetles keep rolling

the starmud of the planet up into a larger cranium

to accommodate the fatty abyss they’ve sipped

from my marrow as the ants who drained

the wetlands and watersheds of my eyes

are beginning to conceive of the bigger picture

my mind painted when I look at them like a visionary

that didn’t believe you had to stick to the beaten path

of somebody else’s pheromones, that you could

put out your own little blossom of stargrass

like a sign of amazement you’re still alive and aware of it.

That death wasn’t a closed door anymore than life

was an open gateway into a garden of wild delights.

PATRICK WHITE