SIXTY YEARS

Sixty years. Serious time.

The spark life of a star. The flash of a firefly.

Am I old? Does energy age?

Should I become the accolite of drastic change?

Pursue the pathos in the mirage of some dangerous young woman

I accord the power to destroy me

just to witness the clarity in her eyes when she does?

Should I revert to my homeless dream

of being an artistic Zen mendicant

shedding poems and paintings like leaves?

Is my emptiness nihilistic or enlightened,

and does it even matter,

does it truly matter,

why should it matter

but for the fact that it does?

Are biochemicals the engines of my perception

and if they are

has my life merely been their hidden agenda?

Dark thought. Dark thought. And another.

Will the rain taste a little of my eyes when they flow away,

will the flower be tempered by their hue?

How will the child in me fare without fingertips?

Last night. Full moon. More beautiful for its passing and mine.

Death made its beauty gape

and I contaminated the clarity with the longing and fear

of a little man who knew he was wrong.

Humbled in my own eyes that I couldn’t

hold it all inside of me with serenity like the sky

or a man who deeply realized

his tears would never green

the rootless desert he wanders through,

his next breath a smudge on the wind,

less than sand on a furious gust of stars.

So be it. I am nothing. That said. Though I focus my will

to enforce my own extinction

there’s always a part more than I can release,

an angry, stubborn echo beyond the reach of my voice,

a bird more than the sky can tally on its rosary of worlds,

a crucial intimacy with something that can’t be detected.

What’s left when everything else has been answered.

This big I don’t know that keeps walking me away from myself

wondering what it might want

that I haven’t already given up.

But there’s no point in trying

to stare the moon into water

to prove you’re a dragon of rain

when the last of the flowers has already fallen

and we’re all heroic flies, each

at its futile windowpane,

falling like spent match-heads

out of the cuffs of our crazy flames.

I have been a star and played for the applause of the cemetery

and know the sound of a single gravestone clapping

like my own tongue

over the mordant oneliners

that bed my mindstream with comics and pebbles.

All my life I have tried not to be so serious a clown

I wasn’t profound but now

I am disgusted with the stench of my own meaning

as if it were bad meat thrown down a good well.

There’s no frenzy of the moon in a painted tear.

So much is cold. So much alone. So much

terror and mystery

in these beginnings without end

that lead us like roads to nowhere through ourselves

as if we were snakes threading the eyes of our own needles

to patch what can’t be torn.

I have been gored on the horn of God

and pricked my thumb on a thorn

to watch the roses bloom like drops of garish blood.

And I have been as sincere as water

in the darkness of my own depths

where devotion carried me like a current

when courage could not

and I watched the eclipses bloom

in the clear radiance of a seeing without a seer.

The quixotic chaos of an encyclopedic hallucination.

Who would have thought clarity so amiguous?

Or that I could push the hook of the moon all the way through?

PATRICK WHITE