BRIGHT WINTER MORNING IN PERTH

BRIGHT WINTER MORNING IN PERTH

Bright winter morning in Perth.

My spirit is foraging on shadows

that have almost forgotten the forms

they elaborate, weaving

easy patterns in the snow

like a mind free enough not to know.

I can see whatever I want in them

as I leak out of things like a truant bloodstream

from a probationary heart

that knows wrong from the start

is just another day of playing it

right all the way.

As a man, as an artist,

I’ve put more faith in my living confusion

than I have in any dead certainty

left standing at the gate

of a mind where nobody’s home.

I am an old man on a mountain of my own

closer to the stars

than I am to the valleys

that wander like scars through their dreams,

though I don’t dream much anymore of anything

in the coldness and the clarity

of dreaming that I’m awake.

And I don’t think there’s anything to search for

that isn’t already leaning up against

that last, inner door

like a gift we’re often too afraid to open

because we already sense what’s inside

will grieve us with more happiness

than sorrow ever denied

or the vows of the fugitive bride

ever made meaningless

when she discovered her true love was change.

Life is transformation.

Life is a chameleonic constellation

that tries to second-guess

what we’re looking at

by growing eyes in our blood

that open the wider we do

to the spree of light

rooted in our starmud

whenever we come out of ourselves at night to shine.

Fire bloods the grail of the crimson moon

you raise like a fever to your lips

to say in a rave of flames

I love you,

and expend your effusion on ashes,

but when you love someone, anything

deeply enough the passion isn’t your own,

and the vision’s impossibly true,

the wine turns blue

and stars stream across

the celestial abyss in the lees of your eyes

that fulfills the legends of your shining

with skies that prophecise

by the flight of mantic birds

you created your own world,

in your own words

and there was room in it for everyone,

but didn’t sign it

before you hid it

where you could never find it. Because

(and it’s a big because from there to here)

you wanted to make it compassionately clear

perfection dances in delight

with its own flaws

like the delicate answers

to the club-footed laws

that try to lead

with painted starmaps of the light

following their own footprints all over the night

to see where they’re going

when even the silence of the most remote star

is the music of the intimate flowing

of the known into the unknowing

which is how the love of life

loses itself in the arms

of a life of love

like a seed in the sowing

everytime the heart goes hunting

to eat like a god.

PATRICK WHITE