NOT TO TRANSLATE
Not to translate the mysticism of contemplation
into the mysticism of action
is to think the baby is so beautiful in the womb
you never let it out to have legs and arms of its own.
At the second full moon in October
the dragon swallows the buddha
but the buddha doesn’t mind.
And there’s a soft warm wind over the wheat
and the road is dusty with stars
that used to be people
and the white sweet clover
raises its wings like a fragrance in the moonlight.
And it isn’t as if you can swim like a fish
through a lull in time like a hole in the net
and get through another constellation
like a fear of life you’d like to forget.
You walk up to yourself
like a gate to a stranger
and drop the latch like a trigger,
your body a sandbag to keep the ocean out.
What do you hope to build
on these cornerstones of doubt
you keep hurling around like meteors
that mistake your eyes for windows?
If only the nod of a random assent
if you weren’t meant to be here
you wouldn’t be
or why when I suggest suicide
do you always prefer apocalypse?
The trouble is, despite appearances,
you’re not dead enough to know
how you’ve always been taken in
by your next breath
and then let go.
The trouble is
you don’t know how
to drink out of your own skull
in the name of anything
without getting a hangover.
The trouble is
you don’t fit the road like a foot
so nothing about you knows where it’s going.
And drifting like smoke
is not the same as lighting the wick
and blowing everything out
to see better in the dark.
The trouble is
there are no eyes in your blood
that shine like the tears of the stars
when they look down upon human indifference
like the obscene afterlife of their light
and turn themselves inside out
not to be what they see anymore.
PATRICK WHITE
