ALL MY EMOTIONS

All my emotions are in a back-alley

throwing dice up against a wall

as if they were consulting a starmap

to negotiate their groping way late at night

through a graveyard of constellations.

I am beyond the knowing and the going

of who I am because I keep happening faster to myself

than the light of the mind can illuminate.

Why wait for a fountain to give birth to a sundial,

when my being is my seeing, and it’s me that flows?

Everyone is struggling to be the exemption of themselves,

everyone is pleading for mercy and probation

from their angst, a spirit of fear,

things and events in the world that could harm them,

so they burrow into the earth

to gnaw on the roots of shadows

even as the moon cuts like a plough

through the darkness.

I’ve been out watching stars,

Mars in Cancer, and Venus, a bell of light

in the cold, predawn morning,

and my fingers, a keyboard of ice

that ache like the music of a frozen piano

and my heart stilled, whenever I look up,

by the infinite boundlessness and beauty

in the nave of an unfounded church

that is the vastness of the life within me

watching its own breath pearl into stars.

What more could I be

than a premonition in the dust,

a fable of water, and even that’s arrogance.

I have watched intensely, I have dared the doors

and the crowns of fire that adorn the dunce,

and risked more than I had to leave at the threshold

of eclipses that embraced me like skin

and learned there is no superlative for pain.

PATRICK WHITE