DO I NOT KNOW YOU NOW

Do I not know you now, you, without past, without future, you distant probabilities of breath, prevalence of a moment that does not exist yet, and will not exist even when you do? As the garden keeps coming up mint and roses, so the earth keeps growing lips and eyes and fingers, and I have those now as you do, gates to greet the world. It’s true the mind makes itself a body out of the detritus and effluvia of the earth; but it does not act like the living upon the inanimate, like God upon dirt, but living collaborates with the living, and all things live, to build itself a chrysalis, that what crawled might now have wings. Black dragonfly on the glowing milk of the waterlily and not a bruise on the light. Four petals of a flowering diamond, and the rest, a bolt of anthracite, I dip my brush in the hotspot of the sun reflected in its eye, and paint you a picture in space, the shorthand symbols and images of my secretary voice, auroras you can see and hear when your eye and your ear are one immediate clarity, a breeze of vital light, the tip of the tongue of the wind on your translucent skin, a visionary summons to live aware of me as I am of you, not later, but now, here, at this joining of rivers such that my thoughts, emotions, insight and blood flow into yours and yours into me on this long fall down from the mountain to the sea. But I have not come before or after you, but with you, and my breathing and pulsing in this unbounded brevity of space, is yours, and the seeing and the hearing and the touching yours, and what of my voice that isn’t your saying, that isn’t a river whispering into its own ear like a future memory, things the mountain said to tell the sea? And if my ignorance is a window of coal trying to stare its way into an enlightened diamond on the moon, a subtler deception of the light, and if the folly of my pain is to try to build picket-fences of whitewashed virtues erect as military palings, and more than a few off the gate, missing without leave from parade, to keep the snakes out, and if I labour freely to assist the effortless effort and know I am not needed, so do you, so is yours, so are you as I am now, a bubble of sentience arising from a spiritual watershed breaking like a womb. Not subtle. Not obvious. You will come to the world like a memory, and what you know, and all that you can know, you will have already been. Blue lights over the entrance; red over the exit. Like a river, I am not poured into you; nor you poured out of me. What I didn’t cry for but held onto like a grape, you will let go of like one tear over the edge of the cup, and that will be the sweetest drop in the vineyard because it was aged in a darkness deeper than night, like a message or a dream in a bottle, a man embodied, to be the wine you get drunk on to fall across the threshold of my blood, relieved to have made it home out of the maelstrom of voices and visions, that call for a mouth, eyes, hands, a heart, the silver earring in my left ear that hangs like a planet from the lobe of the moon that rises higher tonight in the west, a sail unfolding like a loveletter, the first blossom, to unveil the passage in the shale of your breath like a warm wind in the dark.

PATRICK WHITE