WHAT'S BEEN DONE

What’s been done, what’s not been done. Why regret the outcome? Could it have been different? Did you have the will to order the course of events, or were you more the anchor than the rudder; more the talon on the bough, than the wing? Was life a medicine you could take by prescription, a way of healing childhood wounds, a herb of the moon, a steroid, something to pump up the volume, a balloon of nitrous oxide outside a Grateful Dead concert, laughing gas? And now it’s drooping like a lily that’s had its day, a jellyfish, a Medusa, tangled like a parachute in its own powerlines? The grain of sand is covered in nacreous pearl, the pearl in shell, the shell in water, the water in sky and the sky in the black space of a lung it’s never going to fill, like you, my friend, my inadequate atmosphere. Player, stayer, goer, what’s the difference? You never took your Harley on the roadtrip to Baja, did you? Did you conclude that there was no tangible acquisition to be derived from the experience, afterall? No surety you wouldn’t be diminished by the gain of something you couldn’t evaluate? Did she who is not with you anymore, gone, gone, gone, altogether gone beyond, prefer a life among the shadows of her own destruction, than one with you in your tower of light, that judas-goat lighthouse of yours that draws people in like moths and ships so that you can rummage among the salvage of what you’ve wrecked? People like barges of surgical waste, heaped in the water that couldn’t wash itself clean of you, hey, slick? Even with that guitar in your hand, you’re not the sun at midnight, buddy; you’re just midnight; you’re just painted in the tars of your own eclipse, and every time the moon rises now, the ghost of herself, she adds another feather, another cold flame to your darkness. Now comes the mystery to your insistent mystique and discovers you’re as boring as every other match head that ever flared in the sun. Did she look up at the stars, and, running up the path, half-dancing, cull wild lucidities from the nightfields, and you, as she pointed out the constellations, and told you their legends, see surveyed real estate elapsed for taxes? You always had a way of salting the earth, as if everything that wasn’t you, was Carthage, though I suspect the allusion is lost upon you, but what pest control are you going to use on the stars? You’re the striped worm slumping out of toothpaste tube, not a dragonfly in a chrysalis going through a hard time. You sweeten your breath only to corrupt it with your voice. Your ambitions were imperial, but now you’re the reigning monarch of that little patch of dirt in my ears I always wash out to be fit to be seen in public. What’s been done; what’s not been done? Why make the distinction when you’re a master illusionist and all the oases who posed as you in a desert of unactualized windows and pearls and people, were sins of omission, things you didn’t do that could never come undone? She’s dead, brother, a vapour on the wind, something you took in like a playful gust in your sails, and breathed out, when you arrived, withered. Now the moon screams like an ambulance, doesn’t it, as it pulls the darkness up over her face again and again like a sheet?

PATRICK WHITE