YOU CAN’T ORPHAN THE WIND
anymore than you can abandon space
or pry the universe out of the universe like an eye
from a skull or a ring
to save it from seeing itself
as it runs everywhere away in all directions
fleeing what’s centred in you.
You’re not the residue,
the lees of the Big Bang
trying to scry your fate
out of your own detritus,
chemical compliance
with a spiked alliance
in an area of local cooling.
Whether you think
you’re getting a little too much ahead of yourself
or falling far behind,
you’re still the Primordial Atom
before and after time
flashing out of the void
and returning to yourself
like a thief coming and going
through your own window.
And there isn’t a now
that yesterday and tomorrow
could ever track down like today
that isn’t eternal,
that isn’t an undefineable field
where there is no birth or death
or labour of stars on the nightshift
pouring you out like metal from a stone
that isn’t as intimate as oxygen
with every breath you take
to construe the world before you.
What have you seen or been or smelt or felt and thought
that wasn’t your own mind?
And if you were no one
before you were you
how can there be two,
let alone one?
What could outside and inside
mean or be
except the distance
between a wave and the sea?
How could any sword, word, world that arises
slay the water or wound the sky
when you’re the deep, dark watershed mother
of the original fountain
pouring yourself into your own mouth like the moon?
You parse your wholeness
into the things of the world
to define yourself
to the imperial rhetoric of a chatty brain
in a language of forms
who can’t know who you are
until you know with or without a doubt
what you are not.
You’re all of these things.
You’re none of these things.
Listen. The moon’s wearing earrings
that play like rain on the wind
and everywhere she catches the trees’ attention
like water longing to spill
into the empty seas she sails alone.
And her deserts are not the urns of the stars.
PATRICK WHITE
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