Tuesday, December 2, 2008

BLACK FOSSIL OF A STAR

BLACK FOSSIL OF A STAR


Black fossil of a star

that’s bereft of all that shining,

even the emptiness I feel tonight

is a deficit of light

deeper than anything

this darkness that binds me

might reveal.

There are no wounds

worth throwing stars into anymore,

no mouths to watch like weathervanes,

no eyes waiting like water on the moon

to thaw like the jewels of life,

no blossom on the dead branch,

no bird on the green bough,

no voice in the well.

My heart is a rumour of sand.

And even after all these years

of living among the loves, the lives

the lies and the books

of this estranged man I am

I still don’t understand

why he doesn’t know me.

Dark energy, dark matter,

it is no small thing

to give your eyes back to the water

when the seeing is finished with them

and they return to the mindstream

like rain on a snake in a dream

that swallows reality whole.

I look for myself everywhere,

I dare thresholds and zoos at night,

I enter dangerous spaces

riddled with dragon bones

to look for the lotus that blooms in fire

like the first elation of the desire

to illuminate creation with a mind.

But I cannot find the antecedent to my existence

in the shadows I cast upon the earth behind me,

lost in this labyrinth of fingerprints

that keeps leading back to me, nor

in the light of the lamp I hold up before me

like fruit on the bough

to make my way down this road at night

that deludes me into thinking

there’s a continuity to my life

I can follow like a theme of water

through all these changes

back to a sea of awareness

where the keels of distinction

are not torn on the reefs of the brain

and clarity isn’t just

the exquisite extinction of pain.


PATRICK WHITE