INTIMATELY ALONE IN THE ABYSS
Intimately alone in the abyss
equally ashes and shining
there’s a rootless man
walking around on the earth
being introduced and accepted
as knowable and known,
who thinks he’s me.
He suspects he’s a crosswalk
but I know he’s a ladder
a rung shy of rescue.
There’s never been any security in security
and you don’t have to be a full moon
to agitate the asylum
or much of an autumn to lose things,
people included, so he gets up and goes to sleep
and eats and shits and walks and sits like everyone else
who live like unopened loveletters among the bills
with no return address.
Every step he takes is a one-way threshold
and he already knows the value
of everything he seeks
before he’s found it.
Now the stupid think
there’s only one mode of seeing through their eyes
but I know the seeing of the dragon
is not the watching of the flies.
However they cluster like constellations.
Now here a lot of people
will start to worry about
what the stupid think
but I wouldn’t advise it
because that’s what they do.
The less it means the more it can be
and the rest is written on flypaper.
Everywhere I look
I see the north star shining above me
but I don’t mistake my spiderwebs for maps
to the spirit’s lost and found.
Not lost, not found, not bound or free,
my eyes don’t dilute the darkness
with the clarity of the blind
when there’s nothing, really nothing to see.
I’m sixty now. More a mystic statistic
of the jewel in the dreamcatcher
that keeps me away from myself
like the beginning of a recurring nightmare
than a scarecrow playing with matches,
but I’m still a mirror you don’t want to look into.
PATRICK WHITE
