I NEED A NEW TRUTH

I NEED A NEW TRUTH

I need a new truth

I can open like a door

and let the old one walk out into the world

with all her heavy feelings

like wounded swans in the rain

she feathered like arrows

to make her point lethal.

Time doesn’t heal much

and you can plant a crutch

but it still doesn’t sprout leaves.

The old truths just don’t go on bleeding.

They keep cutting deeper than meaning

into the life of a man

still awake at four in the morning

trying hard not to understand

why he doesn’t call out for help

when he drowns in the windows.

There’s an art to being a human

you must be alone to live,

and a dangerous passion for insight

that will open the eyes of the rain

like petals of shedding moonlight

on the empty grave of the brain

that disinters us like unrequited pain

to seek out why we breathe and grow

like assassins suckled on our own shadows.

There are secrets to life

that it is ignorance to know

and only the great fools of the spirit

can comprehend without putting an end

to the profundity of their antics.

The rest is a fiction of semantics

unfolding like the world

in the wake of a word

darker than love

when it’s time to say good-bye.

The doors don’t open by themselves

and the windows won’t cry unless I do

and it may be years before you realize

the jewels of enlightenment

you want to bathe in

to wash the world off your skin

will be drawn like tears from your own eyes

when things like people and candles come to an end.

I will miss you, my friend.

I will mourn you at the crossroads

of every new beginning

like a road I once took

and will not take again

and your absence will undo me

like an absolute of space

and there are things I will say to the moon

when I am shaking with terror and grace

that I could not say to your face

when it rose over the hills

like the unintelligible headstone

of someone who refused to confess

that she was buried under it.

I will wander the house as I do tonight

and try to suggest new shadows to the light

that don’t clash like white against white

in the dark blazing that burns me out

like stars in the marquee of a constellation

no one can see

who looks for me

with any eyes other than these

that have learned to shine on their own.

And I will remember how you once said of my life

that I didn’t deserve it,

and all I could answer back was

that you don’t need to believe life is good

to want to preserve it.

PATRICK WHITE