How much accrues to every word, like the deserts and rainforests in the voice of the wind, that are never heard. Under the wet plaster, the duff of last year’s words, first violets and the bones of the deermouse, local candidates with big meanings. And there are hermaphroditic mushrooms, two sexes in one, penis and gills, mortar and pestle, that come up in the night unobserved from the spores of an ancient vessel. What I have said, and, without invention, didn’t mean, though I could see the dolphin off the bow, is more of a book than the one I did write, straying with the flowers and the shadows that strewed my path. Now I follow like a bird in the aftermath of my life, and the sirens let down their hair like comets in the themes of my wake, to play me gently with the thorn of another heartache because I am a willing sorrow, not a scuttled defeat, and the music that gulls the reef is sweet.
PATRICK WHITE
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