TRYING TO GET UNDER

Trying to get under the skin of the poem and steel my seeing like a nightsky to the blood and muscle of the words, to the mystery of the inconceivability of the devastating emptiness that abides in everything that speaks and means. Trying to walk barefoot over the stars far enough back in time to see myself in the light of a brighter beginning. So I’m not swayed by the black dwarf that stands like a period in my way, the whole and only point of the universe, that gapes like a snake’s unlocked jaw in its radical center without circumference. I look for the moon in the corals in realms where I don’t expect to be understood because the words dart around like fish in myriad, family ways, and there’s no telling what you’ll see next. Enter Hamlet:”words, words, words,” but the words aren’t the poetry, and it’s the careers bank of anyone’s guess to say what is. And maybe that’s it; maybe that’s the draw that labours like a fanatical clown for years for a few shadows of art from the flame of a woman who never answers for herself. Still, I endure these lashings of day and night like a striped fool who doesn’t know how to do anything else but keep on keeping on with the search, as enamoured with the looking as he is with the grail. I wear the night like the tattered cowl of a blind seer, so a greater darkness than the last in this dreamless rite of passage, might suddenly glow like the radiant of an apocalyptic sincerity that restores my eyes like vows I made long ago, and kept. Shakespeare again:“to give to airy nothingness a local habitation and a name.” But the heavens have grown galactic since the globe was a stage and the airy nothingness has subsumed the local habitation and the name back into itself and it’s no longer the sustainable luxury of the swan on the river to know where it is in the boundlessness of being this far from home. The laws change with every new window until even the stars are baffled like the eyes of the rain in a flood of glass. The straight lines are just special forms of curves and the triangles are obese with more than a hundred and eighty degrees. And how can you measure the detectable warpage of the poetically detained, when space itself is lyrically deranged? You can’t step into the same face twice in a flowing mirror. So how can you give it a name that isn’t going to slip like a continental plate and shake a full house out of the theatre? Now the actors and playwrights are standing in line outside the curtain going up on their opening night, and the poets have turned their rudders in for weathervanes to presume to give direction to the wind, eschewing the denser medium that carried their paper boats downstream to brighten the night of an oceanic willow washing her hair in the river with sails. When every word has a thousand voices, and the symbols navigate like waterclocks, and every door that opens is a stranger that knocks on the inside, and all insights are the pollen of a black honey gathered from the eyes of blind flowers like the nuggets of a dream that golds the fool who pans for them, and looking for a place on stage where I can stand that isn’t the threshold of an exit is the theme of a stage that has forgotten its lines in an age that has pulled down the blinds, who trifles with a place and name? Blowing a kiss to the corpse, I resist the obvious jeremiad, but just the same, I’m left waiting in the wings of a shadow that burns hotter than the flame that gave birth to it, the auroral understudy of a star I’ll never see, the seed-throne of the light in the dark matter of me, the derisive issue, the pantomimic hearsay of an unrehearsable reality.

PATRICK WHITE