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
