WHEN I'M ALONE

When I’m alone

I want to be with someone,

and when I am with someone,

I’m twice as alone.

My unhappiness

is a snake-pit

I dangle my heart over

like a mouse by the tail

and when joy does show up,

a butterfly with resplendent wings,

it slowly adapts its palette

to the slag and soot and oilslicks

of the black orchard

shedding its petals everywhere

like micro-eclipses in hell.

And all the poems

I gathered like asters

from the autumn starfields,

all these skies that opened above me

as I walked down a long road alone

in darkness and light,

obedient to the wind and the shadows

that whispered move on, move on

beyond the journey and the arrival,

are merely a leaf,

a tatoo on the back

of a serpent of water

sliding downstream

like rain like mind in search of a course

that isn’t the cracked map

of last year’s dessicated creekbed.

My body is scarred; my heart

a voodoo doll

pierced by a thousand fangs

as it burns like a bee

in a rose of heretical fire

for refusing to turn my honey into venom

or conform to any magic but its own.

And there is no heaven

to appeal to as a last resort.

I endure what I endure

for the dignity

of my indefensible humanity,

knowing the pain

that sometimes turns my nerves

into stand-ins for the lightning

that keeps crackling my cosmic egg

like the paint of my last masterpiece,

also schools my blood like the wine

I pour out joyously

into the empty goblet of the mystery

whenever I host the moon.

Life is neither fair nor unfair

and the seeing, a vision, a poem

is always a bird

born and breaking free of your eyes

opening like a threshold

like a flower

like a crack of lightning,

like the world that hangs,

a veil of water,

from the ends of your eyelashs now.

Love is great, love is much, maybe all,

and the being here incomparable,

and the mystery always

whispering in a field beyond its own compass,

and the wind that tastes of birds,

and the light that tastes of flowers,

and the fountains of darkness

where God washes the stars off her face,

will always urge the extinguished branch

of an astonished pen

to blossom into a poet.

Are the dead any less creative

than the living?

If they don’t come from anywhere

how can you ask where they go?

If everything is the unborn energy

of a dancing god

with worlds in her blood

how can even a blade of grass perish?

This world, this life,

this ungraspable now of awareness

is the passion of a goddess, not a passing thought.

Beyond this riot of blessing and anathema,

this racket of loss and acquisition,

of birth and murder,

there is a silence

deeper than the space

between breaths,

an abyss without longing

that knows you from within

as the fire knows the flame,

or a woman,

the haste of her lover.

If you think you know something,

cast the thought down

as you would a venomous serpent

or let it strike;

even the poisons

can unspool you like wine

in this delirium of life.

And isn’t it more than could have been asked for

just to be here

under a sky

spun finer than the silk of diamonds,

breathing the stars in and out

like trees?

I have been silently and eloquently

stupefied by the wonder

all my life;

and urgently moved to explore

the great ocean of awareness

that intrigued me to experience myself

as the world,

I put to sea with a leaf for a sail.

We must become

more intimate with our vastness, learn

to listen to the whisper

that has always been us

in our own depths.

We have depleted our preludes of awe;

the spirit slags in the pitmines

of our complacent arrogance.

Our own creations

amaze and lull us away

from the sustaining abundance

of what was given spontaneously.

What do we know?

Why water?

Why stars?

Who is it that asks the question?

The fluid continuum of the mystery

is a waterclock

and every receptacle, an era.

And science can advance the shadows of life,

but the answers eventually fall like leaves

and no one knows how to account

for the stars that root in the duff.

What each of us sees

when we see deeper than blood

over the course of a lifetime

are the eyes of the goddess

when she looks at us.

What we are is our own creation;

curse and blessing alike.

You created heaven.

You created hell.

Experience is just the metal

shaped on the anvil of our hearts

into edges that kill like life,

the plough drawn from the stone,

not the sword,

or blades behind the door

that wound like serpents.

You can enlighten or eclipse

the iron in the ore

by pouring it

into a heart or a bullet.

You can make a nail

and build a house

or crucify a teacher.

PATRICK WHITE