THE IMPERMEABLE EMPTINESS

The impermeable emptiness

makes mud of even the subtlest jewels of insight

compared to the innate clarity

of its inconceivability.

Even the night sapphires that breed secretly

in the frenzied tides of the full moon

like an ancient alphabet of eyes

and the spring crows who already know

they’re the ashes of a book,

cannot turn the page of that dark gate

to discover who enrolled them in existence,

who laid out

this starwalk of transformations

like a carpet of blood

that leads to these slums and palaces

of an awareness that expires in its own fire

as if everything I thought and felt

were bundled around the feet of a heretic.

How can a shapeshifter

summoned to the court of these starchamber tribunals,

having accused himself of disbelief,

racked like an agony of smoke

to confess his changes,

do anything but concede

there’s nothing holy in his uncertainty.

I’ve finished painting for the night

and this moment is only this moment

and suddenly I’m dancing with doors again

wondering who I am now

on the other side of my knocking

and what I would do

if anyone other than me

ever answered in a way

that wasn’t just another threshold

trying to convince

my poor, baffled, lost, abandoned shadow

it’s a road.

But I am not deceived anymore

by ultimate arrivals

and quests of the heart

that go out like fireflies

because there is nowhere I can walk

that isn’t intimately and substantively me

and all the myriad forms in the world

are the skin of my own protean thought

and for all the years and miles I’ve wandered,

I’ve never gone further than the back of my eyelids.

Even clarity is the last resort

of those who have forgotten

how to plead with their innocence.

And if you pursue a name,

applause will pour you a bath in the sewer

and if you don’t,

what matter you walk alone in the rain,

nourished by the abyss

like a flame in a lantern?

Nothing diminished, nothing gained,

I am not now

less or more

than I have ever been

nor will the truth of this enlarge me tomorrow.

Still, dark, cold, featureless space,

the boundless chrysalis

of worlds within worlds within worlds,

has added my squabble of thought and passion

to the mysterious nightstorm of life

that rages against my wings

and makes a hazard of every flight.

What madness to want to know

and what madness not to know

whose eyes

keep hurling me out the window,

lifetime after lifetime

like the first draft of a book on the wind

I’ve never learned how to read.

PATRICK WHITE