I SUPPOSE

I suppose I could imagine my way

over to the dark side of things, ease

the black butter of my churning heart

like an eclipse over the bitter bread of the moon

and sit down on the lonely earth,

a bone of a man,

and break it with no one.

I could live like a stern lesson,

throwing salt in the wound of my smile

and I suppose I could mix

fire with the wine

and kneel with the faithful

like an implacable terrorist in church

appealing to a cult of paradise

for bliss and vengeance.

Given my chimerical disposition

and the sensitivity of a phoenix

led around on a chain by an arsonist,

I suppose I could raise three tents of flame

over this circus for the dead

like the petals of a hot rose

over the pearl of the moon

curled in its heart

like the phases of a maggot

and then burn the infestation down

like a cloud of gypsy moths

at the junction of a stick.

I suppose I could do many things

as I have in the past

when I’ve feared the pain

in the glandular cauldron at the top of a fang

poised above my heart

like the first crescent of the moon

rising like a sacrificial dagger

in the hand of a woman I’ve loved.

I could forget you. I could

replace the living nucleus

of every one of the cells in your body

with the petrifying silicates of words

that could turn you

from a night orchid of passion

into a mineralized flower

pressed between the pages

of a book of emotional shale.

Years from now

you could be discovered like the third letter

of a lost alphabet

that died like a language

in the mouth of a species

trying to come to term

in the wrong womb,

or add your brittle polyp

to the great barrier reef

I pass over sometimes

like a tourist

in a glass-bottomed heart.

I could grow mean and correct and small

and grind new lenses for my seeing

as I bumped into my own agony

like a Cyclops with a stake in its eye

learning to feel my way in the world

like a lie in braille.

It wouldn’t be hard

to bleed lava serpents down my slopes

to vent the turmoil of an angry wound

by speeding a couple of villages through time,

twisting their dogs and bodies

like the soft keys of death

in the mouth of an insatiable lock.

I could drink the eclipse

from the moon of my skull

and acquaint the night

with a new mode of darkness

where even the stars tremble to shine

and eyes despair like lovers

on collapsed bridges

trying to cross the abyss between them

and life-enough-to-feel

makes suicide seem like a redundancy.

Or I could grow wise and aloof

and raise myself up out of this avalanche

like a mountain storm

aspiring like a robe I’ve thrown

around my granite shoulders

to imperialize the view from untouchable heights

as I wave from my celestial balcony

to prove that I am not shaken.

I could always rely on my strength

to enforce any lie on the protean mob

that clamours for my attention

and what scriptures of ignorance and enlightenment

have I not pored over

as if they were the secret revelation

of the name of the hidden woman

written in my blood

where no one but the dead can read it.

Only the night

can command a flower

to sheathe its swords,

but I can pull the pin on my heart

like a phosphorus grenade,

a pre-emptive flashbulb of Armageddon,

and burn forever underwater

like a nuclear warhead

biding its time

until Atlantis rises like a mushroom

from the lethal spores of my tears.

But even in late autumn

I’d rather be a green apple on my own bough

than a ripe one

on someone else’s

and is there any flying carpet of pain

that hasn’t been grounded by a sudden lack of sky,

that I haven’t worn out like a road

with my walking in circles in hell,

trying to summon the rain

like a mad dervish

ecstatically entranced by his own pain?

Even in the darkest ore of my life,

thousands of feet below the deepest grave

I’ve ever married my shadow in,

I have tried to live like silver,

tried to hold the last rag

of my deserted nobility up

like the expiring gesture

of a small country on the run.

I have immolated myself

in the transformative fires

that rage like crazed flowers

at the gates of my own imagination

because they were the rungs and bridges and thresholds,

the pivots and hinges

of my knowing

and the mystic crematoria of my demise

into a deeper awareness

of what it can seem

to be alive.

But if you were to ask me

what it is I’ve been true to,

I could dazzle you with my expertise

and still not know the answer.

I could name every star

in the constellations of black holes

that are mapped on the facets of the dice

that have sweated in the hands of the world.

I have rolled the sockets of my own skull

up against that wall

and come up snake-eyes more times

than I ever had a chance to win.

I have been a small planet in a wheel,

a bullet without a quorum

in a chamber of six

that cast their vote in absentia,

and still I am no more

than the mute fool

of my own private excruciations.

When I open my mouth these days

to free my voice like a dove and a crow

to look for land,

to clarify my way into something uplifting,

to use the darkness as well as the light

to illuminate my next breath,

to understand the value and meaning

of what I may have ruined as a human,

I always wind up feeling

like an empty lifeboat

drifiting aimlessly through the fog,

no survivors.

And there is no charisma of suffering

on stage anymore,

no understudy of the pain

hidden behind curtains,

waiting to debut her presence

like a black sail slashed by grief,

no comfort of a prompting hand

on the rudder of the moon

to nudge me across this nightsea home.

My heart holds its sorrow

like an urn

its enigma of ashes

and the raw wounds

I arranged in front of the mirror

like a bouquet of roses

I salvaged from the terminal ward of a hospital

have gone on bleeding

long after they’ve shed their eyelids.

The thorns grow meaner

once the petals fall

and the people and things

you onced cherished

are torn like a child or the sea

from the moon’s arms

without any suggestion of ransom,

and you never hear of them again

and you try

to be brave and true and wise,

a vapour of understanding

arising from the dreamless sleep of the abyss,

and accept everything as it is like a gate

that doesn’t distinguish anymore

between the closing

and the opening,

between the breath taken in

and the breath let out.

But I am not a novice in the world

and I know that in affairs of the heart

utter sincerity

wears the skin of an oilslick

as if it were a designer gown,

and it’s only a dull boy

who wouldn’t flatter the night

when it dresses up

in its sexiest delusions

and there’s something

obstinate in me,

something as loyal as rain

that refuses to abandon the creekbed

of my own circuitous flowing

for an indirection that isn’t mine;

and even if the earth

were to suddenly

right its axis,

I would still walk on a slant,

I would still go around the sun

inclined toward and away from the light

as I kept to my path

arrayed like a fool

in the rags and robes and rages of my seasons.

So I suppose I’ll pretend,

though your silence and your absence

arraigns me

like the wound in the stone

when the sword was pulled out

like the blade of the moon

to coronate a king,

and the pure blood line of this solitude

is left without an appeal

against the legitimacy

of its self-imposed exile

where every star, every

myth of light,

every radiance of emotion

is a fallen chandelier;

I suppose I’ll pretend

this desolation

hasn’t gored me like a horn in the desert,

and trampled the flag of my blood in the sand.

I suppose once again

I’ll confer

around the fires

of my decamped passions

sifting their way like caravans

from one well to the next

across the infinite expanse

of this chastened destitution

as if I were the last mirage of water

on the moon

to look for roots.

I suppose I will endure

another enlargement of my heart and soul

through suffering

until my skin bursts

like a grape or a sky

and the stars that come pouring out

in all their streaming radiance

can’t guess

this deluge of their shining,

this inundation of a tear

painted like a sad prank

under the catastrophic eye

of an aging clown

playing for laughs

in front of a broken mirror

is just another way

a man who won’t

must cry

to bear the weight of his sorrows

like a bell

or a planet

or the heel of a wounded apple

that keeps on growing

like the human heart

on the crutch of a ripening lie.

PATRICK WHITE