EVENTUALLY
Eventually you have to make room in your heart
for everything
because if any part is left out
the whole of it is as well
and the absence is astounding.
No more border guards
checking the passports of the stars
like autumn constellations,
no more anything out of place
like the right dream under the wrong face
or this a jewel and that mere stone.
But there’s a subtlety here
so pay attention
or you’ll end up thinking somehow
that you’ll need to revoke the patent
you took out on your impending self
like a faulty invention
if you want to stop mistaking
a galaxy for a nightlight
and bumping into things that hurt.
The moment you think to improve yourself
you’re already the scar
of a self-inflicted wound.
One part of you wants to be a lighthouse
and the other, Noah’s ark,
but the only way to keep from drowning
is to become the flood
and that you already are
like blood in the lifeboat of a star
that guides you from below through the darkness above
that can’t tell the crow from the dove.
And it’s the truest form of humility
to accept yourself as you are
and realize your wildest delusions
are just as sincere as the missionaries you send out
to lie about you to the unconverted
like waves calling out to the sea.
But even to understand that much
is just another pair of handcuffs on a cloud
you keep binding yourself to in protest
to save the rain from falling as it will
on the worst and best alike.
Why live and work like a polyp
to separate heaven from hell with a dyke
when everyone’s walking on water
and swimming through stone
like angelic marrow in a demonized bone?
Just realize that space is always like-minded
without being the nature of anything
and yet there’s nothing it doesn’t embrace
like the mind you reflect
when you hold your face up
to the mirror that breaks and polishes you to see
the perfect lineaments of divinity
in the smear on the maculate moon,
and the enlightened maggot in the eye of the star
that greets every corpse like an avatar.
PATRICK WHITE
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