THE DEEPER I LOOK

The deeper I look into this vastness

that doesn’t know me,

this abyss that reeks of time,

this space that contains the space that contains the stars,

to assess what I am and what I am not

and whether there’s a distinction to be made at all,

and why it should matter

this commingled vapour of dream and desire,

this jewel of blood and water

I hold up to the light of my own mind like the moon in eclipse,

this palatte of sky

that mixes my thoughts and emotions endlessly

in an attempt to paint an eye

that might recognize me

as the fruit of its own seeing,

so much feels like folly,

so much feels absurd,

the casual indictment

of an unknown sublimity

that follows me like a map

into the strictest deserts

where my flowing atones for its trespass

in a rootless stasis of salt.

Like a threshold

I am the infraction of a mode of obedience

that has always been true to me.

I am the flower of fire

and I am the dragonfly heretic

that burns therein

until the flames turn into wings,

and if I look deeply enough into myself,

I think I might come to know you, my otherness,

as if you were more intimate

than the water of my own blood and breath;

I think I might know if we labour in vain

against the unabatable seizures of death

to adorn each other in our solitude,

to live and know and enhance one another

as if the planet had only one pulse,

and we were all transplant recipients

of the same vital organ

of the same crucial, unknown donor that sustains us,

that our irreplicable uniqueness

is the myriad of one

that accords us each a face

that reflects the all in the all

like a sky

that fits itself to a drop of water like skin

that none might be made small,

that their fairest features

might be the nights and the days,

the stars, and the moon and the sun,

and the tears that fall to the roots of everyone,

and taste of tenderness, joy, remorse, and grief,

taste of long, lonely vigils at hopeless windows

that felt the smear of our reflections

sag with longing as the night wore on,

and the theatre closed

and the ripped tickets

blew down the abandoned streets like blossoms,

and the stars buzzed like allnight marquees

that featured our love, our violence, our fear and our despair

as we grew weary of the incalculable odds

of finding one open door

among the improbable gods who wouldn’t receive us.

I want to know that my life

is more than just mud that I’ve tracked into the house,

and when you turn around,

having tried the door,

and die like a candle in yourself,

and though I don’t know who I am,

where I’m going, what I’ve been

or what will become of us in the next scene,

when you turn around,

forfeiting yourself like a shadow

to the subsuming darkness that effaces you,

I want you to find me standing there

with the resolve of a sundial at midnight

and a bouquet of smiles

I stole from your garden;

and a heart that is astonished

like an impoverished whisper

on the road late at night

by the eloquence of your profusion.

If I have listened like a man

trying to overhear what he says in sleep,

or if I have awoken from the dream

only to find I’ve been following the footprints

of someone I left behind,

a sleuth of the wind

covering its own tracks

in an ocean of air,

and the only evidence of me

the forensic offerings

of the endless ongoing

of an inconclusive tide;

and all that can plead for me now

is a hung jury of sequestered stars,

and this silence that waits to be called like the night

away from its dark reverie

is my only character-witness, still,

no one can say

that the sin of being me was selfish,

that all the folly of a lifetime

wasn’t the spontaneous gesture

of a compassionate clown

who painted a tear under his eye

and a smile on his lips

as if the portrait he painted in joy and sorrow were yours,

as if the likeness that concealed his heart

to charm a child

were everyone’s.

PATRICK WHITE