I AM SO ALONE

I am so alone in this namelessness, sometimes so immured to the wall that my blood moves like a fresco someone’s painted over. I am a tree that has held on to its leaves through the longest of winters into the next spring. And all for what? I could have fared better with the dead. I could have scattered myself down any random road, lost maps to nowhere, trying to follow their own coastlines back to the first sighting. The dark. The ticking. The space is too tight around my body. So much always had to happen before I could, but this is not my straitjacket; mine’s got the sky for a hood. Times like these I tighten like a pipe wrench around the throat of a parking meter for not being the bud of a daffodil. My mind is the afterlife of an ancient future that haunts me for not being born. Pick it up in the morning. Sleep. Sleep. There are graves everywhere footnoting the text with their epitaphs; and not a scientist among them to verify the facts. Wry, pathetic, pleading last words, blighted cherubs of stone, punctuating the quote, as if the earth were indifferent to what it used. I can’t believe that I have lived for nothing. I can’t believe that life loves her children. I can’t believe that love conquers all; and I can’t believe in what does. The mirror longs for what it cannot contain. My heart is number than a thimble. The halo I used to wear so proudly in the rain, is now a nose ring chained to a rosary of slave-trading profundities. The dark is tar. Space, this hateful disparity of leering glass. I have waited to know. I have prayed. I have studied. In my rage for transformation, beside my reservoirs of ignorance I have flagellated my bodymind with the blood-caked hair of purifying comets to turn the water into wine, blood into light, for the stars to be poured into the eye of the green apple that it might taste the radiance before it falls, but the wind is a rough companion and the birds have pitted me like the moon. My life is twisted like a tie on a garbage-bag someone left after they moved out. My life is the lichen of rain on the ceiling that replaced the fraudulent rosette. Or am I wrong to ask, impugned for asking, somehow give affront if I ask why everything seems so inevitably unique and periphrastic? I am appalled by the onceness of everything, the horror of cherishing beauty that must pass, the violence of the sorrow when it does. I have looked upon the world, its trees, its clouds, its people, as the perennials of my own nature; and its fates and accidents, tragedies and toys I have learned like the grammar of my native tongue, and I have seen the earth turn from an ark into a lifeboat with limited space, and given up my own place, again and again, to the immensity of the solitude I saw in the human face. I have not managed to feel compassion for the vicious, but I can aloofly grieve the death of an innocent snake. Petty fool. Mystic migraine. Have my urgencies lied? Le poet maudit. I have dipped my quill of light in the tarpit to illuminate the darkness like a black candle, but this spring takes me aside and candidly suggests for all that I have fed to the flame I have laboured for shadows in vain. The darkness is a mouth, and even the abyss disappears with a hiss like the mirage of a snowflake on a furnace, and time anchors it fangs in my voice and wrenches me from my breath, another coil tighter. Is this data? Is this witness? Is this prayer? Are these the beached thoughts of the new conquistadores of significance slyly advancing up the alien shore of an elitist prophecy? Or merely the ghostfroth and seafoam of a dead tide clinging to rocks on the moon? Why do I suffer? What do I mean? What don’t I mean? Does a clown ask the question even as he paints his face in a mirror framed by lightbulbs that shine like the regimental lotuses of enlightenment? Are the answers skewed because the questions are awry; or is the antidote merely an encore of the toxins, and it’s better to be subsumed like a crowd in the delirium than milk a fang for mercy? The darkness is a shark’s eye. No iris. How long can I twist in a yoga of agony like an arrow bent by its target, before I am strung to my own spinal cord like a feathered serpent finally heeled to the yielding of the bow, and I let go?

PATRICK WHITE