THIS MORNING I’M HAVING

This morning I’m having a lot of lonely fun

in a vast, clear space brighter and more intelligent than silence

and older than eyes

speaking in tongues to the gravestones

before I give them their names.

It’s amazing what a shadow can achieve

when it isn’t attached to anything.

Last night I noted the advance of Orion into winter

and Jupiter in Sagittarius

tried to remember the names of all its moons

and the atomic frivolity of their mythic significance.

Things have changed since I was a boy.

Since I woke up from myself

I’ve never let a god or a mirror

do my dreaming for me

and everything is a passion beyond

what is true and what is not.

And I’m wary and bored with anything

that looks like a map.

The stars are a living language

that have whispered us into our own ears

like a rumour of their radiance,

though I don’t wholly subscribe to anything.

Sometimes I think all knowledge

for all that we make it

the quicksand cornerstone of existence,

and erect ourselves upon it like an obelisk

is nothing more than cosmic smalltown gossip.

The cartouches link up

like constellations and thoughts

and handcuffs and coral and chains

and the good guess and the lie and the weathervane

embalm the blessed in a coffin of law

and sow pyramids along the river like seed.

Like time, I keep an intimate distance

from the things I change

and breathe myself in and out

without a thought or a doubt about my beginnings

or which star my afterlife is aimed at,

or whether I’ll hit the mark or not,

knowing too much about what I don’t know

to corrupt the sincerity of my ignorance with existence.

Just the same, when I listen to space

I can hear the roar of the dragon

firing everything up like the furnace of a black hole

or the cylinders of an unbaffled Harley

that elaborates itself like the road that rides the man

and marvels that so much has come of nothing

and that nothing comes of anything

until September forgets itself

and everyone remembers

they’re nothing like they are or want to be

and everything is always fulfilled, already achieved

and to be so incomprehensibly alive

is to be so understandably dead

that life is not an agony endured without a lover.

PATRICK WHITE