I DISGUISE MY IGNORANCE

I disguise my ignorance

in the simulacra of insight

and plead with my visions

to help me recognize a face

among a billion eyeless masks

that my seeing might belong to.

Meaning is only the matter

of a moment’s emphasis

on the way to its own undoing,

the coerced farewell in the doorway

of a one night stand.

Until he eats his own hunger

a man eats to be hungry.

Once I was down

from my original tower of trees

and began to walk around like a bell,

the last step of my arrival

placed me ambiguously

on the finishing line of a threhold

that prefaced my departure.

How I got to be a homeless moon

in search of a habitable planet

that might divine me like a scar

on a negative from the Hubble

is the tidal froth

of the sea of facts

that ends the watch.

With the tolling of every wave,

every heartbeat, every breath,

the lense yearns to look through itself,

the mirror is the eye

of its own reflection.

We winnow the stars of heaven

in the aprons of radio telescopes,

we put our ears up to the night

and listen to the sirens of light

singing through a keyhole,

trying to overhear

what our masks

are whispering to our faces.

Multiply the birds however you will,

hawk of the morning

or murdered dove in the night,

you are the song,

but appearances demand

you look without looking,

hear with hearing,

because life isn’t a bell

that’s deaf to its own singing,

and no one need look any further

than their own eyes

for proof

the light isn’t blind to its own shining.

PATRICK WHITE