THE HEART IS A FANATIC

The heart is a fanatic

in a world of multiple truths,

adapting to its extinction.

Whenever I try to observe myself,

I’m a ghost

hovering over a corpse

I think is me

as if I had stopped

to take a last look back

at a valley I was leaving

like a woman letting her hair down

to drown in the wake of her own ordeals.

Myriad forms of the world within me,

exhausted by the inexhaustible,

all my continuties

have unravelled like umbilical cords

and I see myself for the very first time

as if I had never existed before,

and the subtle virginity of the mirror renewed,

I know the ancient beginning

of this primordial now

that arrays me to myself as everything.

A more luminous spirit than mine

would rather be loved than right,

but the roads have swallowed their own tails

up to their heads like snakes

one gulp shy of eternity,

and it’s been years and years

only a moment ago,

I set out brashly to expel the dark like a torch

and I wound up on my knees

struggling to forgive the light

like an arsonist trying to follow the plot

in a book of wet matches.

I think of my blood

as the lifelong blunder of a rose

that has habituated itself

to falling on its own thorns

like a voodoo doll

rushing into martyrdom,

and I call the darkest nights

of the blackest magic, love.

I do not know

how old I will be tomorrow,

but my afterlife is younger than I am,

and it seems I am progressing backwards

through all the stations of my advance

and to count the stars and grains of sand

that have passed like a voice

through the throat of the hourglass

is to tally the coffins

I have already outgrown.

I have set all the alarms on my sundials

for midnight,

but it’s anyone’s guess

what shadow of a man might be exhumed

from the grave of a dream that died young.

Weary of the long flight

looking for somewhere to land

in these relentless abysses of mind,

the feather might think

it’s discarded the bird by its falling,

but the wind and the bird know better

as the moon rises over the hills of the nightward

like a nurse from her desk,

straightening the phase of her cap

to take the pulse of the interminable sky

that wakes every morning from a coma

to ask me what I’ve seen.

Gently I raise its own reflection up to its lips

like a spoonful of eyes

and it smiles like a beatific invalid

between sips.

PATRICK WHITE