WHEN IT ISN'T THERE

When it isn’t there, when the door’s closed and the key’s broke off in the lock, and the heart is an older stone than the moon, and where there was no threshold I’m the junkmail coupon for something you don’t want, and I’m gathering asteroids for ballast, and over everything there’s the nuclear fallout of the one that got away, and the species are drawing straws, and it looks as if winter’s here to stay, and the aloof clouds are as intimate as ashes, and the gold sunrise in the crowns of the royal quatternio is beginning to turn back into lead, and the alchemical hermaphrodite is missing one of his/her heads, and I don’t know why, never know why, my spinal cord is always winched to a black bell in a bottomless well, trying to haul up water to put the fire out. Not to be loved. To feel unworthy. Not to know why you aren’t. And to remember you felt as if you were. That’s nothing but the water-harps of the sirens on playback after they’ve left like seals. Homing songs on reel to reel, though there’s really no one to return to. And it’s hard to cherish the absence when the absence doesn’t need you. Have you ever wondered why they don’t hang a lot of mirrors in the lobby of a funeral parlour, and the silence is always a carpet and a fern? But the crematorium is no longer my last rite of passage. I burn, but less flagrantly. Candle. Coffin. Urn. The hearse doesn’t know where to bury me, and only the corpses have the physique to carry me. Bring on the professional mourners if you wish, but the small, tender flame of my life that endures has freed itself from the hook of your wick like a goldfish and swims away, a fan dance, through the auroral depths of the night. And it’s not that I don’t love you. I do. I’ve never seen you. I’ve never touched you. But your letters and your poems, the candour of your passionate declarations, were birds in a sky that hadn’t seen birds since the last full moon raved like a sty on an infected third eye. And there’s no point in thrashing around in the catacombs of the computer for resurrectable prophets, or trying to string someone else’s bow with my arrow as if I were just another one of Penelope’s romping suitors. I am gratefully arrogant enough to be sustained by the upwelling of my disaffected dignity raised like a flag of blood on the ruin of a castle in the distance. I can withstand a siege like the moon, pitted and scarred by the comets and the catapults, but obdurate as the gravestone of a captive that wouldn’t quit. And that’s the irony of it, the oxymoronic coincidence of the contradictories. These cold, bright, hard heights are merely the absence of your warm, dark, soft valleys where I walked in the shadow of your breath, psalming my sheep through the gorge when I was your eloquence and you were my content. Nothing. Not a word. For weeks. The extraction of an axis like a sliver. I weave like a drunk top in the headlights of a trigger-happy cop. Sooner or later, the pain will thaw away from itself like snow and snakes in the garden, and I’ll review the agenda of my transformations like a phoenix in therapy because I can’t cry, or the nugget of a worm with gilded wings, and knock until I don’t answer, on a thousand and one doors, intrigued without wonder, at the strange cosmetics that pitch themselves like snakeoil, a complete make-over, inside and out, on the threshold of a faithless necrophile with taste.

PATRICK WHITE